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Posted on November 5, 2023 | 114 Comments
It’s time to turn my attention to a blog cycle concerning my recent book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, which I imagine will probably occupy somewhere between ten and twenty posts working sequentially through the book, no doubt with some digressions in between. Incidentally, the book has recently been long listed for the Non-Obvious Book Awards – a pleasure and an honour that I didn’t see coming. Obviously.
I’ll get started on the blog cycle in a moment. Meanwhile, just to report that my (mostly indirect) war of words with George Monbiot continues online, with George still enthusiastically trailing his ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece. Jim Thomas wrote an interesting commentary about it, which included an important pushback on some of George’s food systems analysis. There’s a useful account from the GM Watch folks in the intro to Jim’s piece about George’s newfound ecomodernist connections. Rob Dietz and Dougald Hine have also written good articles about or touching on the debate. I’ve set up this page on my website to keep track of the Saying NO debate and will try to keep it updated – feel free to send me relevant items if you come across them.
I’ve been pressing George to clarify his energy figures in the light of my critique, but no response so far. I hope to write more soon concerning arguments about ‘the numbers’ in this debate. In the meantime, I’ll simply endorse Dougald’s shout out in his piece for “people who believe in the importance of treating data with care, rather than waving it around as a rhetorical bludgeon, and who are alert to the limits of what numbers can and can’t tell us about the world and the possibilities for acting within it”.
Anyway, enough of all that for now – it’s time now to get on with blogging about my Saying NO book. I’ve probably said enough already about the context for it, which is set out in its introduction and in various previous posts here. Basically, it’s a critique of ecomodernism applied to the food system, making a case instead for low energy-input local agrarianism and the politics and human ecologies supporting it. So that’s kind of the touchstone, which I’ll come back to in this and later posts.
Chapter 1 of the book lays some groundwork in terms of the structure of the food and farming system, past and present. An important aspect of the present global system is overproduction, due to the structure of the wider economy. A lot of the media narrative around this focuses on livestock, but as I lay out in Chapter 1 (and also Chapter 4), the more fundamental driving force is the overproduction of arable grains (in truth, the underlying economic logic incentivizes the overproduction of everything, of whatever agricultural product each region most advantageously produces, but arable grains are key to the whole system).
Framing the present agricultural system through the concept of overproduction is important for understanding that what fundamentally drives it is not the production of enough food and fibre in order that people live well, but the pursuit of increased profit margins in order that the economic players in the food system stay in business. This guards against neo-Malthusian arguments that it’s necessary to grow more crops at higher yields on less land in future to keep people fed, while protecting wildlife, which seem to be making a comeback these days despite thorough and persistent critique. It may be necessary to grow more crops of some kinds in some places, but as things stand in the present farming system, it would be possible to have less cropland and feed people better.
In my chapter, I draw on Glenn Davis Stone’s excellent book The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World to navigate this issue. Stone looks in detail at how neo-Malthusian arguments concerning increased food production and yields underlie the industrial food paradigm of intensive mechanized arable cropping with heavy inputs of fertilizer and other agro-chemicals.
My feeling is that a lot of existing mainstream farmers are increasingly looking to turn away from this model and explore other possible ways of producing food, while others remain committed to large-scale, industrial input-intensive farming, even if they’re working hard to improve its impacts. Another approach is the ecomodernist one, not driven by farmers, which dreams of taking food production off farmland altogether via synthetic biology techniques, ostensibly for reasons of ecological benefit, but I argue (Saying NO, Chapter 5) also usually for reasons of corporate monopoly.
One of the few things I share with the ecomodernist vision is the belief that incremental change of the industrial farming paradigm isn’t going to cut it as a future ecological food strategy. But whereas the ecomodernists head off into what I consider fanciful and inappropriately depoliticised high-tech and high-energy boosterism, my preferred approach is what Stone calls ‘the third agriculture’, what I’ve called ‘agrarian localism’ or what Jim Thomas refers to as the ‘food web’ in his commentary linked above. This food web, in Jim’s words, “can’t be summed up in one shiny totemic widget. It doesn’t fit a formulaic “stop this, go that” campaign binary (“stop eating meat, go plant-based”). Leaning into the complexities of local agroecological diverse food webs is maddeningly unsellable as a soundbite …. [it] means embracing a messy politics of relationship, nuance, context, complexity and co-learning.
I’ve long argued that part of that politics of relationship, nuance, context, complexity and co-learning in most places is likely to involve coming to terms with the preindustrial farming systems of the locality since these were usually keyed to a low-energy input ecological appreciation of place of the kind we’ll need in the future, once our present and probably temporary fossil-fuelled escape from locality has come to an end. Inevitably, this invites charges of nostalgia, romanticism and bucolic idylls that I’m wearily inured to receiving despite a lot of careful writing on my part to show how wrongheaded this is. The spatial topologies of going ‘forward’ and not ‘back’ that we apply to historical time so easily mislead.
They mislead partly because it’s not about ‘going back’, it’s about ‘going ecological’ and ‘going low energy’, using whatever sources of inspiration we can – and the local agroecosystems that existed prior to the advent of the anti-ecology of globalized and ultimately fossil fuelled commodity farming are often a pretty good source of inspiration.
Perhaps I should call them ‘indigenous’ farming systems rather than ‘preindustrial’ farming systems. I suspect that might invite less criticism, although ‘indigenous’ is a problematic term here in the UK. I mean it in a sense articulated by Tyson Yunkaporta in his book Sand Talk – “an Indigenous person is a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land-base, as part of that land-base” (pp.41-2). Nowadays, many people throughout the world lack such memories, including me. The challenge is to create new ones, and quickly. I don’t think we should be scorning help in that task from any quarter, even the past.
But it’s only partly about the past anyway, because in many places low-energy, local agroecosystems never really went away. So it’s not so much a case of going ‘back’ as going ‘forward’, if we must put it like that, by amplifying a different suite of existing low energy agroecological approaches. Generally, these are more apparent in Global South countries where small-scale, low-energy, local agricultures still feed a lot of people, as Jim argues in his essay. But they do also exist in the rich countries.
As described in Chapter 1 of my book, in a lot of places, including here in lowland southern England, the basic structure of the pre-fossil fuelled agroecosystem involves a rotation between a grass/legume combo that’s directly edible to humans and a grass/legume combo that’s inedible to humans but edible to ruminant livestock, the livestock acting primarily as nutrient cyclers and vectors in the larger agroecosystem, but also as important sources of meat, fat, milk and fibre. I think we’ll see a lot more mixed farming of this traditional kind in the future, probably with livestock and people doing more of the work that’s presently undertaken by fossil-fuelled machinery and agrochemical factories. So it’ll be a case of back to the future with mixed farming as a key component of the food system (not everywhere, because we’re talking local context, not one size fits all solutionism … but mixed farming in its endless local variants will loom large).
On a mixed farm, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask questions like what the energy cost or the land take of the beef it produces are compared to, say, the beans it grows. The cattle and the beans are each part of a larger system, of which they’re both critical components (in northerly climes like here in the UK it gets pretty hard to meet food needs entirely locally in low energy ways without livestock on the farm, but that’s another story).
I mention this because a journalist recently asked me to give figures on the energy input of different sources of protein – bacteria, beef, salmon, beans etc. In Saying NO… I give figures for bacteria and beans (mechanized arable soybean farming in the USA – spoiler: the beans win, easily), but really I can’t give meaningful figures for beef, or milk, or indeed beans from the mixed farming systems I advocate. Partly because there’s not much data out there for such systems, but also because it’s conceptually meaningless. You can only split the world up into beef versus beans in the kind of compartmentalized industrial farming systems that I’m arguing must be superseded.
From a consumer point of view, I also question the idea of ‘sources of protein’. I doubt that protein calculations weigh heavily on most people’s minds as they ponder their options in the supermarket between beans, beef and burger buns. We all need protein in our diets, but people don’t really think about food in that way. Meat in particular is something that most people are pretty hardwired to like both physiologically and socially in the sense of it typically being a status good, almost a positional good. ‘Meat’ and ‘protein’ are not synonymous.
This is not to say that present consumption patterns in respect of meat (or anything else) can’t change. They have to change. But it is to say it’s a bit more complicated than imagining people will happily switch to, say, bacterially-based foods, even if these can be made to look and taste like meat. Putting this book together with this book, my argument in brief is that reconfiguring social status around producerism rather than consumerism (the status that accrues to producing your own food on your own mixed holding) is going to be a better long-term bet for people and nature than trying to trick consumers into thinking that mass produced high-energy bacterial food is the real deal. Obviously, that means that (almost) everybody needs access to some productive land of their own, which is a pretty tall order. But not, in my opinion, as tall as the idea that manufacturing high-energy bacterial food to feed people living high-energy lifestyles in high-energy cities is going to cut it as a long-term strategy in human ecology.
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You can only split the world up into beef versus beans in the kind of compartmentalized industrial farming systems that I’m arguing must be superseded.
This is true; but I rather suspect you can add up the beans and the beef and the milk and maybe even the work it would take to do the jobs the cows do. I’m not sure how wool or wood or berries might fit in… but I suspect it still wouldn’t be a meaningful comparison.
Where it might be useful anyway is that you could reasonably ask the industrial farmers to do the same calculation — how much land would it take them to produce all of this, plus the nutrient-processing that the livestock do? And then the real kicker: what’s the soil health like on that land? How many years is it possible to keep going using that method, or at least what are the known limitations of continuing using that method?
I don’t really care how many calories of grain are produced with how little labour if the irrigation necessary to make it happen means you can do it for 40 seasons (or 30, or 5…) and then never again, or if you have two decades of topsoil left, or if it’s already impossible to grow anything without adding phosphate.
reconfiguring social status around producerism rather than consumerism (the status that accrues to producing your own food on your own mixed holding) is going to be a better long-term bet for people and nature than trying to trick consumers into thinking that mass produced high-energy bacterial food is the real deal. Obviously, that means that (almost) everybody needs access to some productive land of their own, which is a pretty tall order.
I think it might be more realistic than, say, universal basic income — a concept I broadly support, but with some serious caveats. In the current system, I think UBI without rent controls would simply be another transfer of wealth from taxpayers to landlords, with the mortgage lenders creaming off what they can of course.
Incidentally — when I go to your website and click on “Blog” this post isn’t turning up yet, even when I reload the page. I found it through the RSS feed to elsewhere, though, and can also get to it from the “recent comments” widget (not sure if this is a widget, in WordPress terms, or what).
But for other posts, I’ve been able to see them on the site before they turn up in the RSS feed. I don’t think it’s only a problem at my end as it seems to happen whether I am using my phone or computer, and regardless of browser.
I’m not sure exactly why the site isn’t updating correctly, but it might explain why comments are often so quiet at first.
— of course, after posting this comment and reloading yet again, the post is turning up.
@Kathryn
I’m having the same issue too.
Lates blog hasn’t come up when I open the pin on my phone.
Thanks. It seems like I need to clear the cache sometimes. Might check with the tech team, but I’ll try to remember to do this in future. I’m hoping it’s now working. Please let me know if you have ongoing problems.
“On a mixed farm, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask questions like what the energy cost or the land take of the beef it produces are compared to, say, the beans it grows. The cattle and the beans are each part of a larger system, of which they’re both critical components (in northerly climes like here in the UK it gets pretty hard to meet food needs entirely locally in low energy ways without livestock o n the farm, but that’s another story).”
Chris – This is a false take on the problem of getting enough kilocalories to feed people. As someone who had the chance to study under Marshall Sahlins and with a bent towards the anthro/sociological mindset, you are certainly aware that the anthros pioneered EROI-type concepts far earlier than the physicists or the peak oilers. Yes, it is nice to have animal protein to fill out the amino acid profiles of a plant-based diet, but it is NOT necessary to have so much meat. I was a vegetarian from 1970-1981 and I started eating meat again because I had passed up about a thousand free meals due to ideology. Since then I have been a flexitarian and eat a little bit of meat, mostly for flavoring. Tonight we had potato hash with a small amount of chorizo from the local market. (We live in France now and it is easier to eat locally.) Delicious and satisfying BUT the kilocalories come from the potatoes, not the meat.
I have gone through these types of arguments at length in my first two books. The upshot is that I can grow over 3 million kilocalories of food on an acre but grass-fed beef only produces about 600,000 kilocalories on that same acre – less if you are using marginal land. This is over 5 times the amount of energy produced. These are not Jevons-style “shoulds” either. They are all hard numbers. So . . . livestock production does not pencil out in either a survivalist or a cash-strapped situation for the small-scale farmer. In order to make a living you have to do a lot of marketing of your product (certified organic, etc.). In the collapse scenario which we should ALL be preparing for, animals have a place if: 1) you really love having chickens or cows or other livestock, or 2) you can sell to the elites. For those of us already moving towards a medieval lifestyle, they are an extravagance.
Well, I guess it depends on what the limiting factor is. If it’s land, then yes you can get a lot more of most kinds of nutrition from plants per unit area than from livestock (though not necessarily all kinds), but you have to work pretty hard for it in low energy situations. If it’s labour, then livestock probably win in low energy situations. In practice, low energy agrarian societies have been pretty smart at trading the two off and finding mixed solutions. If you have fallows in your rotation, then there’s a case for livestock.
Funnily enough, somebody recently sent me a critique of my first book along the opposite lines to your critique in that they think I overstate the extent to which getting enough kilocalories to feed people is a limiting factor. I suspect they have a point.
I do agree that people will have to eat less meat in most local agrarian situations in the future than is the case in the rich countries today. But I wasn’t suggesting otherwise above – just that ruminants (and other farm livestock) fit into the ecology of the low energy local farmscape. There was certainly a lot of livestock around in medieval times, at least at higher latitudes.
Growing crops to feed the cows over the winter up here in northern Europe, seems quite a faf. But then again, I do like a bit of cheese.
Well living down here in TX ranching ( cattle / sheep / goats ) is about the only thing you can grow without irrigation , close to the gulf you can grow crops rice being one of the big ones but inland one cow calf pair per 20 acres is about the best you can get unless the rewilders want us to grow buffalo !
Living in London, you look around and think – what is gonna happen with all these people?! Then I read about all the towns, villages, hamlets and farms that were ‘disappeared ‘ by enclosure – and continue to be destroyed and agglomerated by capital – it makes more sense.
When I go out to Suffolk, Wiltshire, and or Wales I am struck by the desolate ‘green desert’, devoid of people, life and culture. The land can be fecund with woodland, pastures and gardens teeming with all life forms, alive with festivals and gatherings, cared for by thousands of green fingers.
I love that science and mathematics are finally being used to prove what always seemed undeniable about ecosystems, we will need the facts as part of this process. The emerging truth that mass production and over production are the drivers of the polycrisis carries across all ‘sectors’, as Alice is defining within fashion and textiles. This is industrial society which is undergirded by enclosure first and fossil fuels second.
It is not all enclosures , find a map of London circa 1850 and its surrounded by market gardens , Kent was ” the garden of England ” where Heathrow is now used to be orchards , England has built over some of the best land in the world to accommodate a extra thirty million people since 1945 .
Certainly the area where I live used to be a village with some farmland and forest. And a couple of streets of big posh houses where the rich London socialites used to come for the summer to escape the heat and stench of the city.
It’s only in Zone 3.
But enclosure was certainly part of the expansion of the city; common land, after all, couldn’t have housing (and so on) built on it. There was quite a fight over enclosure around here in the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epping_Forest#Fighting_enclosure
Meanwhile, I do still have the right to collect wood from the forest, but I can’t graze cattle as I’m not a landowner, and pollarding and running pigs is also not allowed any more.
This is interesting – I live in Brixton Hill where there is a windmill still standing from the very fields you are talking about. You are talking after enclosure and the subsequent destruction of community self provisioning way of life. If we imagine that the commons and small farm community self provisioning continued to today, the city would retain its market gardens and the 30 million would be happily distributed through out the land.
Sorry, I didn’t really explain myself! I guess I’m saying the enclosures create the need for industrial provisioning and housing (the built environment that makes up the city). Cut people of from there ability to provision, make them work in factories to earn a wage to buy there provisions (usually all within the confines of the factory), build more factories and wage worker housing. Something like that.
My apologies if this is covered in Saying NO, but I still have not gotten time to read it. I’m in the middle of threshing beans, building a small scale version of the Winnow Wizard to clean those beans and some squash seeds. And getting garlic planted, drying chilies, freezing squash, making hominy… You know.
A question:
” involves a rotation between a grass/legume combo that’s directly edible to humans and a grass/legume combo that’s inedible to humans but edible to ruminant livestock”
Why don’t the livestock eat the same grasses and legumes as the humans ? For example, soybeans were originally a forage crop.
60 years ago we us to grow about 50_acres of vetch as cattle feed , a legume it made good hay and after planting could be ignored untill harvest .
Thanks for the link to Jim Thomas’s essay. I thought this was really interesting.
‘Despairing of political progress on climate, he told me that he felt that there was now no choice but to gamble on technological fixes. He accused me of not really grasping how dire the climate crisis was.’
I think lots of people are caught in this sort of position: they can’t contemplate either climate induced catastrophe or the end of our modern way of life, or they can see the need to abandon much of our way of life but see no political route to that end. Grasping at (or gambling on) long shot techno fixes then seems both comforting and our last best hope – I expect to see lots more of this in the form of ever stranger geo-engineering ideas as we go forward.
Personally I’m in the latter camp – we need to abandon much of our modern way of life and I see no political route to that happening in an orderly manner. So I expect we’re in for a bumpy ride.
Climate change is undoubtedly a wildcard in all this. It seems perfectly possible to me that we could find traditional agricultural systems offer less guidance than we hope for because the climate regimes in which they developed no longer exist – I’m thinking about what happened to peasant farmers in Pakistan last year, or the sort of summer southern Europe had this year. I think that’s an argument that could equally be leveled at rewilding to – just what does a ‘natural,’ wild, self sustaining ecosystem look like in a rapidly changing climate – no one knows. All that said I think a wide range of localised agricultures probably offers us collectively the best chance of adapting to/resilience in the face of what’s coming.
Ultimately the transition to a low energy world will teach us that the primary product of agriculture isn’t profit and that houses aren’t primarily investments. But there’s a lot of vested interest arrayed against that idea and no doubt some will resist it long past the point where its blindingly obvious (if its not already).
I’ve been clearing out the bit of hedge we’re going to lay this winter and watching a pair of sparrowhawks hunting in the long grass around the trees we planted last winter – I think much of the problem lies in our distance, as a culture, from these sorts of realities.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/How-Todays-Energy-Bottlenecks-Could-Bring-Down-Major-Governments.html
A little food for thought here , what used to be tin foil hat is now being discussed .
Interesting comments. Thanks.
Strong agree with Bruce – I’m very much of the ‘they can see the need to abandon much of our way of life but see no political route to that end’ school of thought. Which needn’t be a fatalist or quietist position. There’s plenty of ‘work in the ruins’ to do, as Dougald Hine puts it. I wish there were more quiet and soulful thinkers like him, and fewer shrill voices determined to ridicule anyone unable to profess a cunning plan to save modern humanity. As somebody said on Twitter “Rich western elites and their faithful clients know their days are numbered and will humour any fantasy to postpone the inevitable. They will literally say and do anything before going back to the land.” Yes to that.
“I think a wide range of localised agricultures probably offers us collectively the best chance of adapting to/resilience in the face of what’s coming.”
Yes to that too.
“the transition to a low energy world will teach us that the primary product of agriculture isn’t profit and that houses aren’t primarily investments. But there’s a lot of vested interest arrayed against that idea”
Also yes.
To Greg’s question, somebody with better stockkeeping experience than me can probably answer better, but I’d venture to say that while livestock would be delighted to eat most of the crops grown for humans (and generally do when you forget to shut the gate), it suits us to give them lower grade fodder which enables us to achieve other objectives. So, taking John’s example of overwintering cows – yes it’s a lot of work, but wheat for people and hay for cows enables you to spread the harvest over the whole year and keep yourself fed (and maybe warm), while building and managing soil fertility, providing traction and so on. This is why I think it’s worth really understanding why premodern local farming systems did what they did, because the lessons are pertinent now, or soon will be.
It’s interesting that erstwhile mixed farmers in marginal places like the British uplands have become pure stock farmers and are tending to keep the stock out year-round. Less work, but probably less system productivity too?
Broadly agree with Joel, and I share that pain of seeing concrete deserts and green deserts when the possibilities for abundance are so much greater. As per my response to Walter above, sometimes I think I’ve overstated the difficulties of a transition to a small farm future – not politically, for the reasons Bruce mentions, but ecologically.
Also broadly agree with Kathryn. But I’m cautious of quantifying comparisons between agrarian localism and the industrial food chain – not because I shrink from numbers, as some allege, but because I think the former involves many more complexities that are easy to omit, and perhaps impossible not to, which unfairly benefits the latter in such comparisons.
@Chris
Following on from my slightly flippant remark about wintering cows (and cheese)………
Firstly, I have no experience of having a cow but looking from afar, it seems to me that having a few cows seems to generate extra work/capacity/equipment.
A barn to store winter feed/hay.
A barn to house the cows.
Milking cows daily.
Growing/harvesting/drying hay.
Then there is all the veterinary stuff.
I guess it’s all about scale.
“Ermintrude” wandering round a small holding is a lot easier to accommodate than a dozen cows.
Then there is the trade off against the benefits that cows bring. CHEESE!!!, manure, grass into protein etc.
Being a non farmer, I’m not sure if the effort of running a few cows is worth the effort?
I’m just not an “animal person” full stop
Going back to pre industrial farming ” ermintrude ” would also be the ” tractor ” you do really need a pair but they increase the amount of work possible immensely , home grown beef does taste much better plus no growth promoter hormones or antibiotics , the same with pigs and chicken , all are usefull and have a niche in a mixed farm .
The next agricultural revolution will be re learning what our farming ancestors knew .
I’m with Diogenese here. A dairy cow (or more) IS a lot of work, one reason I’ve never had one, but in a low energy farm economy it’s often more work and more precarity not to have one. This is my basic take on learning from premodern farming systems – not that everyone nowadays should necessarily do exactly the same, but it’s good to start from the assumption that the people driving them historically were smart and weren’t doing pointless things for the sake of it (more of a modern affliction, IMO). Understanding why they opted to do them can then unlock a lot of ecological insight.
It’s the size of cows that bothers me.
Maybe something a bit smaller like an Andean camel?
Can they be milked?
What does Llama cheese taste like and was it ever on the Inca menu?
Vicuñas, guanacos, llamas and alpacas seem to be a bit more like a sheep. Less high maintenance? Good weave from Vicuña hair.
Anyone got any experience of keeping them?
Just to add……
I’m not sure that any Andean camels were/are hitched up to a plough?
South Americans seemed to get on fine without big oxon pulling ploughs? Though if they had access to them then maybe they would have used them?
This might be a bit more up your street, John (my first thought was what interesting and useful neighbours they would make):
Years ago, Andrea Trinchieri bought a few alpacas to help mow his lawn, but soon he and his wife Nadia Foglia had installed spinning machines at home and were selling their yarn and knitwear as a full-time job.
They do it all – shearing, cleaning, carding, spinning, weaving, and even a bit of dying (with plants) – so the final product is “kilometer zero.”
Initially, it wasn’t easy to find equipment for their small batch farm; their first purchase was a carding machine from 1890. Over time, Andrea has built custom machine parts and even his computer-assisted wooden loom.
From: https://faircompanies.com/videos/alpacas-turn-decaying-farm-into-thriving-slow-fashion-homestead/.
As a few of our neighbours keep milking cows (used to be commonplace in almost every other family a few generations ago) and my wife works in beef(!), I too have wondered whether bringing goats or sheep into the mix (for milk and cheese) might offer something extra to first ‘us’, then potentially the village. But the Jerseys themselves aren’t big, though you can get miniature Jerseys (if you can find a breeder) that are even smaller and can be milked once a day, as opposed to twice for a regular cow. But cows in general are pretty docile. With safely grazing sheep my worry would be dog attacks, though the donkey might have something to say about that. With goats… I have seen them tethered to a small cart as draft animals but as escape artists I can imagine they’d somehow get into my neighbours gardens and that could potentially turn ballistic. Llamas… can spit in your face. Where you’d get a camel from I have no idea. As Chris sort of says, and I sometimes wonder – am I trying to reinvent the cow?
@Simon H
Interesting stuff Simon. Thank you.
By Andean Camels, I mean Vicuñas, Alpacas, Guanacos and Llamas not the old world variety.
In Chile, they call water cannon riot vans “Guanacos” after the animals spitting prowess.
During the time of the Incas, Vicuñas were only allowed to be owned by the ruling elite due to the very fine yarn that could be spun from the fleece.
Cows come in all sizes from the useless minis ( size of a big Labrador ) to the most available Holstein . The Irish ( pesant ) farmer kept Dexters a general purpose breed sat sing around four feet and a half at the shoulder said to come from Spanish gallions that wrecked during the armada and swam ashore .
There is a very old grainy video on YT showing English longhorns pulling a hay wagon .
I secretly want to keep muskoxen, for their wool (qiviut), but it’s firmly in the “yeah, right” category.
On keeping a few milking cows, I know a few people who have followed this path, in slightly different ways. Seems to me that, ideally, if you can rotationally graze them, trusting your electric fence night and day on common land where you are surrounded by understanding neighbours who have no truck with your husbanding practices, then the workload is lessened somewhat (one being hopefully better herd health with fewer parasites to worry about). In ever-warmer central Europe, some farmers are attempting pasturing year-round (no cattle shed). Hay bales, when needed, can be bought and delivered and covered with a simple tarp to keep them dry over winter (i.e. a hay barn may not be a necessity, but a local farmer/tractor driver will come in mighty handy).
When I helped a farmer who didn’t graze his few cows outside year-round, I recall the sheer weight of manure in the cow shed soon became a team effort to dig out, ripen in a steaming pile somewhere a short wheelbarrow ride away, and later manually spread on the fields in the time-honored manner of muck-flinging, often while half-pissed on the farmer’s home-made wine that always seemed to contain a few mildly disturbing floaters as the bottle got passed from mouth to mouth. Cherished memories!
Someone else, an old neighbour of a friend, scythes all his winter feed for his flock of sheep, having grown towards more of an all-encompassing lifestyle of essential daily chores centred around considerate animal husbandry. Hats off to that.
I had the best coffee the other day after chatting to a friend as he hand-milked a couple of Jerseys for maybe 10 minutes each, then separated the milk back in the kitchen (courtesy of a very useful Chinese gizmo), adding the cream and froth to the coffee. The buttermilk went in the fridge, and given the daily flow of raw material and time, and with a family to feed and an antipathy to sell, in theory that’s all their milk, butter, cheese, cottage cheese, ghee, cream, sour cream, healthy pig swill ingredient and excellent creamy coffees sorted. The only fly in the ointment for me is the plastic ear tags the cows have to be fitted with, plus you can’t really take a break unless you rope someone else in to your cunning lifeway to take over the reins occasionally. One fly in the ointment for the farmer himself is that not everyone takes kindly to encountering a few cows being grazed here and there about the village, even though this used to be more common (though not behind a portable electric fence). The rural idyll will never be a frictionless environment.
I admire all the above approaches to survival, and increasingly feel like an uncomfortable halfwit every time I leave the shop clutching another couple of plastic bottles of opaque white liquid, then later dump the bottles in the blue bin, practically every day.
John! re camels, I was thinking of trying to put you in touch with Billy Smart’s Circus. How silly of me!
Anecdotally, while we’re on fibres, yak’s wool is meant to be the bee’s knees.
🙂
One of the stories from my Mother’s side – when her parents lost their farm in North Dakota in the 1930s (it didn’t rain for 5 years) they moved rural small town near Minneapolis and kept their milk cow on the porch.
I think my grandparents verged on being premodern farmers, emigrating from Poland in the early 1920s. Milk, butter and cheese have always been important.
I guess the point I’m making about cows and or Llamas etc is that…….
Yes, people have kept cows for a very long time (in Europe) because….well…. people have kept cows for a very long time. It’s what people have done.
Keeping Llamas was not an option.
In the same way as South America farmers didn’t have cows because they weren’t available. So the benefits of cows for ploughing wasn’t a thing. But they found other ways to farm/provide/survive/support complex societies.
(Were they ploughing and how?)
In a small homestead setting is a cow “overkill”?
ps. Why have deer never been domesticated? Or have they?
Reindeer have been domesticated. I’d thoroughly recommend Piers Vitebsky’s book ‘Reindeer People’ about Siberian reindeer herders (and their encounter with Soviet communism and its attempts to turn nomadic pastoralism into collective farming) – one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. A problem with domesticated reindeer is that when they meet wild reindeer they often think ‘screw this’ and abscond.
But generally I don’t think deer seem to lend themselves to domestication. In medieval England they were kept in deer parks to furnish venison for rich people … but not really domesticated as such. On a smallholding scale, I’d think the fencing costs would be rather high. As indeed would be the fences.
With cows, yes they’re quite large for the kind of micro holdings that people had historically – hence the land reform cry for ‘three acres and a cow’. But they were often kept by ordinary folk on the commons, sometimes with support from the better off (e.g. rules about the local lord providing a bull for the cows on the common). The idea being that owning a cow was a defence against poverty that could otherwise manifest in more awkward ways for the rich.
Some of these historical arrangements around cattle are informative for thinking about the boundaries of private and common property today. E.g. around here in the west country there were systems in which cows were grazed in common with a shared village cowherd, while milking and haymaking were done by individual owners, with cheesemaking done collectively.
Ah, yes of course. The Sumi and reindeer.
D’oh! Sami
But I’m cautious of quantifying comparisons between agrarian localism and the industrial food chain – not because I shrink from numbers, as some allege, but because I think the former involves many more complexities that are easy to omit, and perhaps impossible not to, which unfairly benefits the latter in such comparisons.
I think agrarian localism might still come out on top; a sort of “I can whup ya with one hand tied behind my back!” situation, if nothing else because industrial society wastes so much energy and does so much damage hauling around tonnes and tonnes of metal in addition to whatever the primary objective is, whether that’s tilling a field or getting bread from the bakery to individual homes. But as per other discussions, whether it’s worth the effort (vs other uses of time) is another question entirely. I lean more and more toward thinking that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and leaving the technocrats to argue over finer details of what can and can’t be done while the rest of us get on and try doing it.
That doesn’t mean that arguing on their terms is never worthwhile. As I’ve also noted elsewhere, you’ve clearly rattled Monbiot, which is a better result than I expected. Perhaps I have some learned helplessness to examine here, around whether I think it’s actually possible for us “little folk” to sway the minds of the powerful? The historical record is not particularly encouraging.
…and also an interesting article bearing on the ‘debate between British authors’ by an Ethiopian author:
https://nation.africa/kenya/blogs-opinion/blogs/-the-global-food-fight-and-africa-s-forgotten-farmers-4426380
Seems like it’s not only ‘well fed’ Englishmen like me who have issues with George’s criticisms of agrarian localism!
I love how that article from Africa (“Harvesting Hypocrisy”) calls out George Monbiot and his alignment with corporate narratives.
The sides seem to be drawing up. From Resilience –
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-11-07/can-agriculture-and-biodiversity-coexist/
U.S. overproduction- caught on the treadmill of financial pressures to get big in bulk commodity grains, farmers here are as much victims as anyone.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/september/off-farm-income-a-major-component-of-total-income-for-most-farm-households-in-2019/
Right now, 35% of U.S. corn production is converted to fuel ethanol for happy motoring. ( at barely over 1:1 EROEI ). The vast majority of the remainder is for confined animal feed. Millions of acres could be freed up for alternative ways of growing food simply by ending the political fiasco of ethanol subsidies ( untouchable since Iowa is one of the first political primary states) and some form of tax on feedlot meat versus pastured.
The techno utopian seen to be saying give some land back to the wild and flog the rest to death , pouring in all the agrochemicals and fertilizer they can , what they have missed out is cost , glyphosate has gone from around $ 100 a gallon to $300 a gallon in the last two years , fertiliser has doubled and still rising this is pricing itself off the market .
The much vaunted GM crops ain’t that great either , a local sowed 110 acres of New drought tolerant corn ten miles away from me , we had a drought and watched it grow to around four feet and then die in June , he silaged it , then in July planted old yellow dent and turned on the irrigation , he harvested that in October it made a good crop , unsprayed and unfertilised the GM guys were not happy !
In ten years I have yet to see a drought tolerant crop work out .
There is no ideal place anywhere within chrissmaje.com for me to post this comment, so I’ll intrude here a bit and say it here.
Recently, I asked Chris whether … or to what extent … his thinking on the small farm future considers voluntary energy descent (in relation to involuntary energy descent). He said (basically) his thinking on these topics and themes is weighted primarily in the direction of responding to a future scenario in which he expects an essentially involuntary imposition of energy descent. (These terms are defined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_descent )
I’ve been pondering quite a lot lately on voluntary and involuntary energy descent, and the thinking can get rather tricky, because both processes are fully underway, simultaneously, in some respects — even though world “techno-energy” use (as I wish to call it), a.k.a., world primary energy use, has been increasing. It takes a nuanced way of thinking to consider that both involuntary and voluntary energy descent have already kicked in. Obviously, some people in some places are deeply engaged with voluntary energy descent. And involuntary energy descent is also occurring in certain places and contexts — e.g., in Germany of late, largely due to a sabotaged gas pipeline.
Anyway, I’m a very strong advocate for voluntary energy descent — which is essentially a political agenda (for me, in the broadest sense of the world ‘politics’ — since I’ve got little hope or use for ‘state politics,’ which is what people tend to associate with this p-word).
I have a deep need to discuss the politics of voluntary energy descent (VED) with interested people. It seems the politics of VED isn’t an open conversation one can readily plug into, however. Or am I mistaken on that? And where might the conversation be sited on the Web? Is there a good place for it somewhere?
Of course, in such a conversation we’d also discuss involuntary energy descent.
The politics of VED appears to me to be wildly different from the politics of IED! And I want to explore this with others.
Just to clarify, I’d be delighted to host and be a part of conversations about VED. The kind of farming, transport and localist approaches I write about and am active in are heavily focused on VED. However, if you ask me how I think ED will proliferate globally, I would say mostly through IED, largely because contemporary culture and political economy has no widely accepted ED narrative – as seems apparent to me from Monbiot’s condemnatory comments about me such as “Our aim should be not to use societal collapse as a tool to shape the world to our tastes, but to seek to avert societal collapse”. But I certainly didn’t mean to convey the impression I’m uninterested in VED.
Thanks for this clarification, Chris. Actually, I thought (suspected) what you meant to convey was just what you have now made more directly clear. I’m so used to being dismissed as naively optimistic when I talk about VED that I’ve developed a sore spot around the topic, and I very nearly expect to be waved off as a fool. But I can’t give up on VED, because in my view to give up on VED is to give up on using reason in relation to what I regard as one of the most urgently important topics.
” … largely because contemporary culture and political economy has no widely accepted ED narrative ….”
This is PRECISELY how I’m reading the situation, which is rather a comfort to me, actually — that we both frame it in precisely the same way.
What I WANT to do is to try (with others, of course!) to stimulate the emergence of a “widely accepted ED narrative.” … and one in which VED is given a seat at the table, rather than a dismissive hand waving.
Do you know of an internet forum where we can have this conversation in its own topic space? Can you add a discussion space for this question … which might be a rotating topical space where we can discuss various themes and topics apart from the blog posts?
I want to explore ED, VED and IED in relation to politics. I want to do some conceptual innovation… though it’s not entirely clear to me what this means just yet. And that’s why I am longing for dialogue on these topics and themes.
I wonder whether there are any “Net Zero” forums where it might make sense to bring the topic up.
I fear a lot of them will be a bit too hand-wavy over carbon sequestration or offsetting efforts; I am not convinced by most offsetting arguments (too much double-counting), nor do I think high-tech sequestration is likely to be massively helpful, so if we want to get to Net Zero we’ll all have to change how we live.
People within various Zero Waste movements might also be worth conversing with, given how much embedded energy there is in manufacturing.
Thanks Kathryn –
I shy away with anything which says it’s about “net zero,” because the “net zero” rhetoric is often closely tied up or entangled with a lot of preposterous nonsense, like the BECCS / overshoot narrative, which makes nauseates me.
I’ve been exploring the edges of the question Might the folks in the degrowth movement be helpful in this way? I’m not yet sure that they will be, but I’m still exploring this possibility.
Now there is a can of worms !
Voluntary is happening now mainly through the price of energy , it does not matter how much there is if you can’t afford it .
Then there is involuntary that to is happening now diesel and jet fuel supplies are getting critical here in the USA , the oil majors are not drilling much because of costs but to keep their balance sheet in the green they are buying up smaller companies and adding their reserves to their own .
The USA debt interest hit one trillion this year about 25% of income , that’s because the economy is in poor health , energy prices are killing off businesses that are not core and they are being subsidised , anything ” green ” ( tessla ford gm ) are receiving them and still can’t sell battery cars . Wind generation does not work without subsidies , laws and planing regulations ignored .
The knock on from ” economies of scale ” really bite you in the but when either you can’t get the raw materials or you can’t sell what you make ( ford Loosing $43000 on every electric f 100 pick up) .
Lol refining has the same problem , you can’t turn down a refinery it runs at minimum 95% or not at all , shortages of heavy crude are crippling jet fuel / diesel causing smaller refineries to close .
Power outs are a recipe for riots .
How ” diversity ” goes on in a time of shortages of basic commodities does not look to rosy .
A vast can of worms
It is a lot more than just a can…
@James R Martin
Are you familiar with this site?
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
I loiter around it quite a bit. It’s got some really interesting stuff on energy decline in the comments section.
Some of the recent comments are starting to talk about much more localised economies. Starting to alone with topics discussed here.
@ John –
Yes, I’ve explored that website a bit. It has often been recommended to me. And it’s … well, okay. I’m not super impressed with it. It makes valid… and some important points. But I think it gets a few things basically wrong. Or, rather, I’d put a lot of things differently. The author and I are operating within differing paradigms.
For example, he says …
“According to Alexander Pope, “the proper study of mankind is man”. Likewise, the proper study of the economist is – or should be – prosperity. We need to know what prosperity actually IS, how it’s created, and how it can be measured.”
That’s true… but only up to a point. It’s true and valid in a limited way. I think what the field of economics ought to be about (its paradigm) isn’t prosperity or money, but wealth. But I’m using wealth in deep association with the root word of wealth, which in Middle English was wele, which meant well-being, which is roughly synonymous with health. I think economics should focus its attention on how to bring about and maintain the health of people, ecosystems, the soil, rivers and streams… anything which can be evaluated in terms of well-being — or wele. All else results in neglecting the patterns which connect, which intertwine all things and beings. That neglect results in illth — a word coined by John Ruskin, which I use to mean something similar to Ruskin, but also different than how he described it. Illth is counterfeit wealth, since it produces I’ll health in people, ecosystems, rivers, soil and so forth.
I believe modern economic theory is founded on lousy theoretical premises which can’t stand up to transdisciplinary theoretical testing of a consilienent sort. In any other discipline, this theoretical weakness would have been subjected to just this kind of a critique, found to be wildly inadequate, and the field would have had a paradigm shift. But economists don’t care about the other disciplines, generally. (He says with a wry smile.)
I liked Credo by Brian Davey on the topic of economics.
Thanks Greg. I’m looking into the book. I just downloaded a free PDF copy found linked near the top of this page. https://credoeconomics.com/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-01992-5
“From air to your plate: tech startups making food from atmospheric CO2”
The excessive energy requirements weren’t mentioned until near the end of the article, and rather indirectly, framing it only as a monetary issue:
“Unlike crops, which rely on free sunshine to grow, CO2 food producers need to invest in expensive equipment, such as photovoltaic panels to help reap power. And direct air capture also doesn’t come cheap.”
Yep , the arrogance of mankind , in a decade we can make things better than millions of years of nature jostling for the best answer .
Energy Descent, a Kaleidoscopic Dialogue
https://rword.substack.com/p/energy-descent-a-kaleidoscopic-dialogue
Okay, it is dark long enough to get caught up on some reading. Like Saying No. First chapter.
Chris, you are wrong, wrong wrong about cows. They are delicious but not magic. Ninety percent of what goes in the front comes out the back. If the ley crops are not harvested the 100% of the nutrients and organic matter go back into the soil. The ley will still have to be tilled to make it a productive vegetable field. I will give cattle a pass on two fronts 1) butter, 2) cheese.
Manufactured or not, studge is not food. It is the last gasp of an industrial food system. I think you are going to get to it later but the energy costs are simply prohibitive. Occam’s Razor implies that the solution with the fewest assumptions is the best. Pinning your hopes for future food production on an unproven complex industrial energy intensive system is stupid. There are too many places for the system to break down.
Our old conventional neighbors talked about “Feeding the World” with their farming. Now their kids are trying to scrape out a living while their wives work off farm jobs to provide health insurance and money to make ends meet during the 4 years out of 5 that the milk checks don’t cover living expenses much less farm expenses.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency just got on Minnesota because the state wasn’t doing enough to make sure the ground water was safe to drink in eight southern counties. Northwestern Iowa is in worse shape. It is all due to excess fertilizer inputs and manure leaching from CAFO livestock operations.
Looking forward to chapter 2.
Not to mention that to have milk, the cow needs to have a calf every year. 800 pounds of beef is a lot, even for Americans. Per capita beef consumption is only (!) 56 pounds.
Really? For some reason I thought that once the cow has a calf, milk production will continue for as long as you keep milking the cow regularly (and it has enough food to keep up milk production)… so calving might be every two or three years rather than every year.
You don’t have to wait until the calf is 800 pounds to eat it, of course. One person to one cow is probably more cows than we need, though; a cow in one family or household makes a lot more sense.
Yeah, and going back to my cow size phobia.
If a family “grows” a cow for meat, then there is an awful lot of cow to preserve for one family to eat.
…not really?
An 800lb cow doesn’t give 800lbs of meat, because there are bones and hooves skin and stuff to deal with too, and they all have weight. Even if you practice nose-to-tail eating, you’re looking at something like 600lbs for an 800lb cow.
If you have a family of six, that’s 100lbs of meat per person, or 45kg — pretty close to the European average per-capita meat consumption, which is around 52kg/person/year. Of course, children will eat less than that, but then teenagers will eat more, so I think “average” is probably about right.
What probably makes more sense is for some families in a neighbourhood to keep a pair of dairy cattle, and some keep a pig or two, and some have a few sheep, and probably everyone has a few chickens (mostly for the eggs; but keeping a self-sustaining flock of hens will mean eating at least some chicken, because you don’t want lots of roosters and eggs do produce lots of roosters). Maybe some people keep ducks or geese or turkeys or goats. And then nobody is stuck eating nothing but beef, and nobody is stuck eating nothing but chicken.
@Kathryn
800 pounds is the dressed weight for a market sized beef cow.
I know that the English are known as beef eaters but two pounds a week per person ?! Is that a realistic number ? We don’t get any where the US average beef consumption of a little over a pound per person. I’m not sure that we eat a pound of meat total per week (per person).
@Greg the 52kg is average meat consumption, not beef only, it is from Statista. I think they had North America up somewhere around 70kg meat per person per year.
I can certainly eat a kilo of meat per week without trying very hard. I usually don’t, but that’s because I have so many vegetables to fill up on.
Well, yeah. Cost “externalization” is what modern / contemporary / Megamachine economies do. It’s what they ARE. No one — almost no one — wants to discuss that this is a fact. It is a fact.
We are deep into collective madness. No one wants to talk about that, either. Sigh.
What did I say about cows that’s wrong, exactly?
Nothing !
So…I’m still not quite sure what I got wrong about cows. If 90% of what goes in comes out the back and you get some meat, milk, fibre, warmth and traction from the other 10%, that sounds like a pretty winning formula to me. In low energy situations without mechanical traction, mowing and ploughing a ley by hand is no joke.
Regarding John’s concerns about the ‘lumpiness’ of the meat dividend, I don’t really see this as a problem. When a household produces too much to eat, it’s a nice problem to have and the solution that people invariably find is to share the food with others, usually in a routinized or ritualized way that builds in some reciprocity and solidarity. I think I’ve mentioned Doug Bock Clark’s book ‘The Last Whalers’ here before, about an Indonesian village whose people subsist largely by catching a few sperm whales every year, and then dividing the meat between them according to finely tuned clan-based arrangements. A cow is nothing!
But I agree with Greg about the absurdities of farm incomes and agricultural pollution. The way I’d put it is that when a household produces too much to eat, it’s a nice problem to have that’s easily solved. When a whole society not only produces too much to eat but organises itself so as to ensure that this overproduction is chronic and compounding, it’s not a nice problem to have and it’s not easily solved.
Busy threshing and cleaning cow peas today, sorry about the slow response.
I take it back. You are not that wrong. Maybe just wrong, wrong. In your defense, you do explicitly state that livestock don’t produce fertility.
Page 20 ” which basically does away with the need for grazed….”
Page 21 ” and therefore around having the correct number…”
Neither are true. An organic farm does not need any livestock to manage the fertility. imHo, of course. Livestock remove nutrients from the field. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t grow.
A good selection of cover crops can build soil fertility and structure without needing to be harvested. Winter rye and hairy vetch for fall planting, or oats and peas, sorghum and soybeans for summer. They can be left to mature and reseed themselves for nearly year round or all summer soil building.
Of course cover crops can be harvested with the corresponding loss of nutrients from the field. If you turn the air up on your combine you can reseed the field with the light grain.
Both a grazed ley or a successful cover crop will have to be tilled to prepare for a vegetable crop. Or any following crop.
Warmth from a cow ? Ummm.
Tillage by hand is no joke. Oxen are very slow. One acre per day with two people, one leading the oxen and one plowing. Horses are faster but still need to be fed and watered while they are standing around in the winter. Two and a half gallons of ethanol from a bushel corn makes a tractor look pretty good. And any surplus would be very welcome in the community.
Given how much food I have produced from a tenth of an acre with hand tools, I’m not sure exactly why two people need to till an entire acre. In fairness, I don’t produce any of my own meat, milk or eggs, and only a minimal amount of the grain we consume; I’m sure that doing so would expand my footprint substantially.
I think the relevant comparison here isn’t “cow vs tractor” but “cow vs hand-tillage” — Chris is talking about cattle in a situation without mechanical traction. So let’s say you do have your traditional “five acres and a cow” set-up and you have a pair of oxen (perhaps shared with your neighbour) and a pair of people…. that’s still only five days to till the entire farm, or ten days for both yours and your neighbour’s. How often are you doing that? Once a year, maybe twice? Isn’t some of it left as pasture each year? If your farming setup is such that you cannot spare those days of labour, you’re working very close to the margins indeed. I know some of this is more about whether the weather is right at the right time, but I am certainly not up for digging an acre of land by hand in one day. I almost certainly can’t physically do it.
As for warmth, if your cow comes into a barn at night or during the winter, it’s not that hard to use the associated warmth for heating something… no, not the body heat of the cow, necessarily, but the heat generated by the decomposing muck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compost_heater has a few different options. None of them are as complex as a tractor running on an internal combustion engine, though the methane-harvesting options do need some kind of way of actually burning the methane. Yes, this sounds kindof gross, but it’s not like you’re breathing the compost fumes. To me it doesn’t sound any more gross than having a room inside the house in which humans defecate and then use drinking water to flush away the nutrition…
Which brings us to nutrients. I think a lot of the major minerals end up in the bones of the cow, which can (after being thoroughly boiled for broth) be returned back to the soil. The nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen that make up the proteins and fats we actually eat ideally aren’t coming directly from the soil at all but from the air, via plants first and then livestock. But local cycling of human wastes is also important for good micronutrient balance (and for not messing up local waterways), as is free movement of wildlife that can bring in nutrition from other areas.
Keeping a cow also provides long term food yes a steer is big but you can smoke , dry , can , make jerkey , even salt it down , then there is the long term high fat food , butter and cheese , butter can keep three months ,cheese can keep indefinitely , just the thing for the dark cold days of winter when everything in the garden is dead or waiting for spring , it’s stored calories just like stored potatoes .
I suggest you watch anything on you tube with Ruith Goodman and Peter Ginn , there is a wealth of information on how our ancestors farmed and survived and how much sheer bloody hard work it was to keep body and soul together .
For the technoutopian future there are increasing problems
https://climatechangedispatch.com/dutch-energy-prices-double-as-country-transitions-to-cheap-green-energy/
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/11/11/siemens-cancel-virginia-wind-blade-factory/#more-68757.
It’s too late the West can no longer finance the “renewable future” .
Yes, the stored energy in livestock is a major advantage over winter, especially at higher latitudes.
Bear in mind that Chap 1 is really a backgrounder for people who know little about farming, where I lay out the basic structure of some historical farm systems. It’s not saying that every farm needs to be mixed or to have cattle – it’s just explaining why mixed farming is historically common, but less so in rich countries nowadays. So I don’t think it’s wrong x3 or x2. But it would be fair to say that things will be more complicated than I can cover in Chap 1 in any given farm situation.
All the same, as per Kathryn’s comment it strikes me that a farm system which is unable to bear the minor losses associated with cattle metabolism (especially if nutrients are being returned through human & animal wastes) is one that’s either massively degraded historically or stretched very tight to bare survival. In that situation, if it can’t accommodate cattle, I’d doubt it could accommodate tractors, even ones powered by biofuel – unless they were parachuted in from fatter external agroecosystems (no doubt the ongoing debate mostly between Kathryn, John & James under my previous post is relevant here).
From another angle, draft livestock remain luxury items for a lot of small farmers globally today. And they were relatively common on farms even in the world’s richest countries after a century or more of fossil fuelled development right up until around World War II. So I don’t think it’s all that fanciful to invoke a world of mixed farms and draft animals. Here’s someone who’s keeping the faith: https://twitter.com/HawHillFarm/status/1718979227234525290
If indeed we’re talking about really tight situations, then warmth from livestock is a resource that’s not to be wasted, as in many North European farmhouses that used housed cattle for heat. But Kathryn’s suggestions re manure heat also make sense.
As is often the case with discussions here, much depends on the specifics of the future locations, timeframes and scenarios we’re wrestling with. But it seems to me quite likely that there will be more mixed farming with rotating cattle, more draft animals and fewer tractors in the future.
Perhaps it also depends a bit on population pressure on the farm system. One with unmown/harvested cover crops sounds like the pressure is low … maybe scope there for a hunting or pastoralism plus gardening approach? Grazed cover crops fit a higher pressure situation, and give a lot of benefits besides food from the livestock. But yes you do have to be careful you’re not mining the soil. Even more so with modern stockfree arable farming.
I think we might also see local systems where the soil is okay-ish in terms of structure and nutrition and the temperature is okay-ish but there is either not enough or too much water for what we think of as “traditional” mixed farming.
But I suspect that what we think of as traditional mixed farming (five acres and a cow, or three acres, or or whatever) is really a very narrow slice of what “mixed farming” can mean. The longer I engage in both horticulture and foraging, the more overlap I seem to develop — planting fruit trees in out-of-the-way places, inoculating fallen logs in the park with mushroom slurry, collecting seeds from wild plants for some of my winter microgreens, making sure I get puffball spores all over my boots whenever I find a dried one so that they can spread, salvaging apricot pits from a big tray of donated apricots at the food bank so I can plant them… and while my friends and acquaintances go “oh, that’s Kathryn, she’s just kindof a geek about this stuff” I am told my grandmother was much the same, if a bit more flower-oriented. Every holiday road trip, every visit back to the family farm, she would be taking cuttings or seeds or sometimes even dividing root clumps to try and establish these marsh marigolds or those pansies or whatever else in her garden at home. By the time I came along she was very much on light duties, so I don’t think my propensity for opportunistic propagation is really something I learned from her, and I didn’t really learn much gardening or foraging at all from my parents.
I currently very much enjoy the idea of some light savannah agroforestry — broad lanes of chestnuts, apples, cork oak, cherries, pears, hazels and so on, with a decent understory of shrubs and herbaceous perennials, and ample space in between for pasture, vegetable plots and grains. My experiments growing squash on fairly newly-made compost have gone well enough that I’d be tempted to try doing something like piling up as much of the manure and dead leaves into one big long windrow as possible (or maybe making some raised beds with hazel hurdles) and growing squash in that the first year, and other veg the second year, then raking it out and using it for grains (or maybe spuds?) the next year, then sowing a cover crop for grazing the fourth and fifth year (maybe different species each year to reduce disease? and some kind of mob-grazing setup?)… I don’t know how practical this would actually be, it seems like I’d probably want a lot less area for the veg than for pasture, and the trees would need a fair amount of planning and maintenance, and no land is a blank slate for me to impose my plan on anyway. But I’m really noticing the difference between the Far Allotment (where I have a couple of hazel stools to coppice and am right next to an abandoned plot which is now reverting to (somewhat overgrown) woodland which I have permission to use for logs for mushrooms and other bits and pieces) and the Near Allotment (where if I want a pole I have to either buy a pole and take it there on my bike, or manage to be there when the trading hut is open (Sunday mornings — I’ve had another commitment for about 2000 years) to buy a pole from them; and if I want leaves I have to scavenge them from somewhere else rather than just raking up what’s already there). The Far Allotment is also very much more sheltered from the wind, though it doesn’t get quite so much sun. I think I prefer the conditions there, on balance.
As far as biofuels are concerned, I rather suspect liquid ones are only really worthwhile if you’re very short of a certain type of seasonal human labour, and you have enough labour at other times to get on with making the biofuels, and you have enough (biofuel-operated?) machinery to make their extraction straightforward. Sunflowers grow well enough, give a decent yield (but is it as high without NPK fertiliser?) and as I understand it are a pretty good carbon crop as well as an oilseed, but I don’t know that I want to devote an acre or half an acre or something to a sunflower monoculture from which I’m not really going to get any other yield. Beech nuts might also be a good source, and beech woods are often very lovely places for interesting, edible-to-humans fungi (maybe some with medicinal value), and you can coppice the beech trees, so I feel like an acre of beech coppice would be a better source… but first you need to gather the beech nuts, and they’re tiny and annoying; I don’t know if a nut roller would speed things up. I think beechnut oil extraction, like other industrial vegetable oil production, is usually done with hexane rather than a press, but…. I don’t fancy working with hexane at home (and I probably don’t have a handy crude oil refinery to provide me with the stuff anyway) so I guess it’s a manual press and a lot of filtering, with a yield of about a third of a litre of oil from 1kg of beech nuts (or 1 litre from 3kg of nuts if we want to make the arithmetic tidy later). Beech forest in a mast year will drop about 250kg of beech nuts per hectare, or 617.5kg per acre. Let’s round down to 600kg because let’s face it, there’s absolutely no way the squirrels are letting us harvest the entire crop; so we have 200 litres of oil to play with, but it might have to last us multiple years, because not every year is a mast year.
OK, I looked it up briefly. Once you have the oil, as pure as possible, it has to be combined with an alcohol in a supercritical state (so, put the beechnut oil and some methanol — or ethanol, but surely we’d want to save that for drinking, I’m not going to the trouble of running a still and then using all the alcohol to make diesel — in a pressure cooker of some kind? It isn’t clear to me whether you can mix them and then apply the pressure or whether you have to somehow inject the oil into the supercritical methanol…) I suspect this is beyond the capabilities of your average home pressure canning kit! Not to mention you need 200ml methanol for each litre of oil, so for our 200L of oil we want 40L of methanol… in home distilling you’re going to get about 10% methanol from a fermented sugar mash (made from beetroot) so you’ll need 400L of that, which means maybe you’d better have some larger-scale equipment than a little countertop still, and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs might want to have a word if they’re around and functioning and catch wind of it.
But all is not lost: it can be done at a lower pressure, indeed at room temperature, but then you need a catalyst, often a strong base such as potassium hydroxide (KOH), and I understand the resulting diesel is of lower quality: one source says “okay for candles or a tiki torch but I wouldn’t put it in an engine”. Hmm. I think KOH comes from hydrolysis of potassium chloride these days, but was traditionally made from potassium carbonate and slaked lime. I’m not sure if you could just use wood ash lye… if so, at least there’s probably a lot of that around, and it doesn’t take too too long to dissolve the wood ash in the water, let it soak for days, filter out the solid ashes and then evaporate all the water. I suspect the answer is that you technically can but you’re going to get even dirtier fuel at the end of the process as a result.
So, you mix your strong base (about 8.5g of KOH per litre of oil, but I would use rather more if I were trying it with wood ash lye since wood ash lye isn’t pure KOH… maybe 20g? I don’t have any idea what the lye yield of wood ash actually is) into your methanol to make potassium methoxide, and then you combine that with your oil to make biodiesel and some… byproducts. The biodiesel has to be washed afterward too, gently so you don’t make more byproduct (and less biodiesel) than you wanted. The good news is that you don’t need a huge amount of the potassium hydroxide. The other good news is that the byproducts are mostly glycerine and soaps, which frankly we’re not going to stop needing anytime soon.
So… yes, you could technically do this, and you might even, with time, be able to get the oil filtering and diesel washing steps good enough to actually be able to put said biodiesel into your tractor without gumming up the works — but if you have a tractor of your own, please, do not take my word for this! The decision to use beech instead of sunflower does mean a reduced yield, but I’m not sure that the oilseed yield is going to be the limiting factor if I’m trying to also source my own methanol and my own strong base, and the beech trees will have a mast year when they feel like it whether or not I do any maintenance of the coppice, whereas sunflowers need to be replanted every year. (I know of someone who is crossing sunflowers and Jerusalem artichokes to try and get a perennial sunflower that produces nice big oily seeds, but she isn’t there yet.)
I feel like if I had that kind of liquid fuel-producing facility, though, I might be inclined to use it for a chainsaw and maybe a woodchipper, rather than a tractor. I certainly wouldn’t want to be relying on the tractor. My understanding is that even a small tractor weighs 2 to 4 tonnes. That’s a lot of metal to carry around, both in terms of the energy efficiency of the engine, and the weight on the soil. Tractors vary wildly in their fuel consumption, but it’s multiple litres per hour at minimum. Let’s say I have a very small, very efficient tractor and it only uses about ten litres of diesel per hour; all that work I did to create 200L of biodiesel, and I’ll get 20 hours of tractor time out of it. The smaller the machine, the less fuel it will use per hour, but also the less work it will do per hour.
I think I might just run some pigs in the beech wood if we’re having a mast year, and trap and eat squirrels in the other years, and hook up a plough to a couple of oxen.
The problem with biodiesel in cold climates is that it gels and plugs up the fuel filters. Our neighbors have concession stands at local fairs and wind up with a ton of used fryer oil. Doug tried hard to make a clean fuel but spent a lot of time changing filters.
In a grid down scenario if you really needed a tractor it would probably easier to build a gas producer furnace thing and bolt it to the frame of a gas tractor , no need for tech equipment making diesel just a fire that smokes badly and burns whatever you have at hand .
Ah — a wood gasifier sort of thing? Or something that can run on methane harvested from a compost heap?
I still like the idea of oxen better, if I’m honest.
Of course, you can take all of the calculations I did about making biodiesel at home and apply them to trying to make solar panels (hard, certainly harder than biodiesel) or wind turbines (probably slightly less hard if you can get the magnets), too. But neither of those produce particulate pollution (or CO2 or methane for that matter) in their ongoing use. They do wear out eventually, but then so does any engine that runs on a liquid fuel. Battery power is certainly an issue, but there are non-chemical ways to manage that too, for a number of applications (see the Low Tech Magazine blog post on small off-grid compressed air systems, for example, at https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage/ ; another potentially useful but option is using the solar/wind power to pump water to an elevated reservoir, which can then run a small water turbine for electricity production when it’s dark and/or the wind isn’t blowing), and while they’re less convenient than the small, portable lithium batteries we have today, they’re probably still more convenient, once they’re installed, than doing without whatever tools they are powering.
A problem with energy storage is the resulting loss of energy, such as for every 10 kWh of electricity that’s put into storage, you might get less than 4 kWh back out of storage (the round-trip efficiency for hydrogen storage in caverns, envisioned as part of the 100% renewable grid dream, is only around 38%), and additional energy is required to create the storage equipment and facilities.
The storage inefficiencies thus require building and installing more solar panels, for example, than would otherwise be needed to do the same amount of work without storage (during daylight hours, in this example). So using the energy as it’s being generated is preferable, instead of storing it.
At a household level, if solar panels are used to keep a refrigerator/freezer running, it might be better to minimize the batteries (and eliminate the electricity input at night) by using some type of thermal storage in the refrigerator/freezer design, like water (or gel) blocks which freeze solid during the day and keep the fridge contents cold (like a modern icebox) during the nights when there is no energy supply. Combined with adequate insulation, of course.
For household lighting, that article about compressed air storage cites a 2015 study which found that operating three light bulbs at night (three 8.4 watt LED bulbs running for 12 hours) would require a tank size of 18 cubic meters. If this tank were spherical, the most space-efficient configuration, then the diameter of the tank would be 3.2 meters. Thus, a spherical steel tank more than 10 feet in diameter, plus a compressor, turbine, and generator, would be required just for 3 light bulbs, in addition to the solar PV equipment). Surely there’s a better way than this to substitute for candles.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274898992_Sizing_Compressed-Air_Energy_Storage_Tanks_for_Solar_Home_Systems
Steve
While storing energy (in batteries or pumped hydro or whatever) is definitely subject to efficiency losses, I always feel like comparing that to something like burning fossil fuels is a bit ridiculous: the amount of heat lost when running an internal combustion engine is pretty inefficient compared to travelling the same distance on a bicycle, for example, and moving an entire two tonne vehicle in order to get a 100kg person from point A to point B is also pretty inefficient. So no, we won’t be able to use every electron produced by solar/wind/hydro generators, but we also don’t get productive use of every calorie of liquid petroleum fuels.
I would be tempted, for lighting especially, to go with a chemical battery; if you have access to LED bulbs you probably also have access to batteries. Compressed air might well still be useful for some things; the most obvious use I can think of for pumping water into a reservoir, though, is for that reservoir to act as a sort of header tank to give sufficient pressure ton an irrigation system. But it’s late and I’m tired so probably not thinking of everything.
Kathryn wrote, “pumping water into a reservoir… to give sufficient pressure to an irrigation system…”
That’s another good use for direct PV solar (DC pump pumping while the sun shines, no inverter), but it’s not energy storage per se, it’s storage of water (at a higher level) for later usage as water (with gravity-caused pressure). A water tank on a hill (or perhaps on top of an apartment building) can thus provide pressurized water to a household 24/7 when there’s not a working grid connection (during outages or off-grid), without needing batteries or other energy storage for pumping at night.
It’s another example of how renewable energy sources such as solar panels at the household level can be more productive (with less energy wasted) than larger scale systems.
Point taken on Chapter 1. It is a very good introduction for people who have no idea what it is like to run a farm.
I don’t begrudge cows their 10%. You can’t milk a pig or a chicken. But I have not found them necessary to produce a living from vegetables and simultaneously build soil. In my mind cows are best suited to areas that are too steep, too dry or wet, or too rocky to grow more valuable crops.
I am curious if there is anyone making a living farming using a yoke of oxen for all their traction needs. What can they use them for ? Can they plant, cultivate and mow too ? The more useful they are the less of a burden it is to feed them while they are standing around for 6 months out of the year.
Chris wrote, “From a consumer point of view, I also question the idea of ‘sources of protein’.”
Not quite what Chris was getting at, but “protein, agnostic of source” seems to be a trend desired by high tech investors.
A recent article (titled “Agri-food tech’s building block: narrating protein, agnostic of source, in the face of crisis”) in the journal “BioSocieties” looks at the narratives used to promote the “3rd Generation” of alternative proteins (“Sourced from non-food sources such as larvae, plastic waste, air; produced with microbial fermentation processes; powders and flours as final ingredients; proprietary formulations”).
“Agnostic of source” is said to be the aim, which “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the solution depicted in Soylent Green”. Making these products “appear and act as food” is a challenging “ontological problem”. However, there are various narratives deployed to make these proteins seem attractive, especially to venture capital:
“…those in the alternative protein space deploy three interlocking narratives to make sense of and garner support for their innovations. One reflects protein’s historical and ongoing status as a charismatic nutrient (Kimura 2013), that with the contemporary denigration of carbohydrates and fat, is the one macronutrient that remains unequivocally good. In close alignment with discourses on alternative proteins as imagined antidote to growing demand for meat, fish, and dairy, a second narrative recounts a looming protein crisis combined with urgent calls for action to ensure enough protein to feed a growing world while avoiding the environmental and welfare concerns of livestock production. A third depicts protein as protean, nearly infinite in sources, although nutritionally singular… Put together, these protein narratives work as “fictional expectations” suitable for attracting capital (Beckert 2016). Specifically, innovators in this space call on protein’s nutritional importance to make palatable innovation with novel sources and processes, which in turn are imagined to meet the needs of an impending crisis and thus have the requisite impact attractive to venture capital (Goldstein 2018). These narratives, in short, make alternative protein investible.”
“Inasmuch as proteins are in fact both ubiquitous in environments and materially protean also presents challenges in making many of these products appear and act as food. This ontological problem is potentially quite acute…”
The article’s sections include:
“Making third generation protein edible”
“Making third generation protein investible”
The article’s closing sentence:
“Without these narrative building blocks, there would be little to galvanize investor interest in third generation proteins, much less continue the fiction that this sector and this approach is the way to solve the highly complex problems of human (and animal) nutrition, animal welfare, and environmental well-being.”
Guthman, J., Biltekoff, C. Agri-food tech’s building block: narrating protein, agnostic of source, in the face of crisis. BioSocieties 18, 656–678 (2023).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41292-022-00287-3
They can’t “galvanize ” people to invest in alternate energy generation anymore , the wheels fell off that one when profits entirely rely on government subsidies , fickle things governments with a track record of cutting and run when the times get tough .
Finding investors ready to spend billions on untested products and the fickle tastebuds of the populous , good luck with that , it all sounds good when you sit on the top of a ivory tower sitting in a echo chamber but could easily become the Edsel or De lorian of the food industry
This is a fascinating essay by Lewis Mumford from slightly more than a whole lifetime (for me) ago. It’s interesting to consider and explore how Mumford might have influenced suchlike as
Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, the two of whom were friends.
http://www.mom.arq.ufmg.br/mom/02_babel/textos/mumford_authoritarian.pdf
Anyone interested in putting “ecomodernism” into a rich and complex historical perspective will benefit from a careful read. The themes are all intertwined.
Briefly, in relation to a few of the comments:
– Thanks for your diesel calcs, Kathryn. I hope to dig into them at some point when I have more time. But since a hectare is bigger than an acre, do you mean 617.5 kg/ha & 250 kg/acre? You must have some lazy squirrels where you are if you’re only allowing for 17.5/617.5kg loss! For info, my tractor is a small-ish 1980 Ford 3600, which weighs 1.8 tonnes. My first thought when you estimated 10l/hr for fuel was that that was too high, but I see that it’s been confirmed by the good people of the Nebraska Tractor Test Lab. However, if I were to max out its work capacity for a full hour there probably wouldn’t be much left of my farm. Overall, I marvel at how much work it does for so little fuel. Not that that negates anything you’ve said above. The 3600 will probably star in a future blog post here.
– Also agree with Kathryn that there are many different ways to be a ‘mixed farmer’ … including being a stock-free veg grower as I argue in Chapter 4 of ‘Saying NO’. I’m all in for experimenting with how best to coax a livelihood from the local ecological base. But I do believe it’s easy to neglect the importance of animals in doing so.
– Thanks Steve for that interesting stuff on protein. Regarding ‘agnostic of source’ another point to make here is that while there’s a concerted effort among certain food activists to label any pro-livestock narrative as complicit with Big Meat … even small-scale agroecological mixed farming … there’s a lot of crossover in the corporate food sector with meat and alt-meat: https://www.etcgroup.org/sites/www.etcgroup.org/files/files/07_big_meat.pdf. Kind of a heads I win, tails you lose scenario…
– And thanks James re Lewis Mumford. An important pioneer, whose work I’ve read less than I should have done.
@ Chris –
I read that essay from Mumford yesterday. I think I must have also read it years ago, but I was a different person at the time and it didn’t have quite the impact as it did for me yesterday. Now I’m seeing it in relation to what I’m informally calling “the three guys” (in casual conversation). The three guys are Mumford, Ellul and Illich, all of whom develop a way of understanding and thinking about technology (in the most obvious form of technology, such as in machines) and techniques, methods…. and the institutions, ideologies and cultures which embody these. The three guys are just the theoretical nucleus of a much larger school of thought on these themes, of course. But the three guys did amazing and important — valuable — work, and my suspicion at the moment is that it was Mumford who got the ball rolling, because he wrote about (I believe) the core ideas of the school before the other two guys came along and further developed the key ideas and insights.
So I’ll be diving deep into The Three Guys School … because I think they offer a narrative which is urgently needed now, more than ever before. It’s a narrative our POLITICS requires, and without which nothing good can come of the future — or present.
You may have seen my recent essay here.:
Energy Descent, a Kaleidoscopic Dialogue
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-11-13/energy-descent-a-kaleidoscopic-dialogue/
This “essay,” if it deserves to be called an essay, was meant simply to provide a necessary contextual basis for a much deeper development of the various themes it addresses. I will develop the ideas here, which are merely hinted at mostly, a lot more fully in a series of articles or essays beginning with this one. The three guys will always be there with me in this task.
I think I may be finding a way to actually return to politics. I honestly don’t think what we now call “politics” really is politics at all. It’s just the machinations of a Megamachine. If Emerson were around today, he might say “The Machine is in the saddle and rides mankind.”
Dialogue is key! We must return to dialogue as a generative cultural practice, and political one.
https://archive.is/rB25v
Interesting piece from a UK vet claiming global warming is causing horses to be fat because of better grazing , make of it what you will .
Botheration. I do know a hectare is larger than an acre but my brain clearly slipped!
However, the 250kg yield is in fact per hectare, so an acre would be closer to 101kg. I suspect that makes beechnut oil a very poor choice compared to sunflowers or another oilseed, rather than simply a low yield one.
I was assuming heavy predation pressure on the squirrels (perhaps from a household that doesn’t keep livestock), but yes, a small number of squirrels can completely devour all the beech mast.
Incidentally all the hazelnuts I harvested this year we’re not from the Far Allotment (squirrels got the entire crop there) but from a park more locally that has some stands of hazel set in much wider open spaces. I suspect that birds of prey had something to do with this.
Were not. Dratted autocarrot!
Steve L – not certain if any of these ‘direct solar’ refridgerators have an internal lightbulb, but that might be preferable to living with a compressed air orb and 3 LED bulbs.
https://www.freecold.com/en/freecold-photovoltaic-solar-refrigeration/refrigerators-freezers/
Nice features, a direct solar refrigerator using a “cold accumulator” (like a re-freezable ice block), no inverter, no batteries required.
Brief follow up on a few points:
– On Kathryn’s point about comparing renewable vis-à-vis fossil energy losses, the issue for me here is simply about the claim that renewables can fully replace fossils. There’s no doubt that fossils are themselves wasteful (in many ways…) but there’s an abundance of them to waste. Whereas if we’re talking about replacing them with renewables, the energy costs and feasibility of doing so comes into play.
– Regarding reservoirs and suchlike, I think this gets difficult at small scales in the absence of abundant energy or prodigious muscle power. Which makes me wonder about all those little household or homestead level permaculture designs in a low energy future. Instead, more social hierarchy? More commoning? More resignation to the limitations of the landscape?
– On Greg’s point about cows, yes agreed in present circumstances I wouldn’t advocate for mixed dairy-vegetable farming. Interestingly, the agricultural historian Joan Thirsk showed in her book ‘Alternative Agriculture’ that the preferred crops for farmers in good times here in Britain have basically been wheat and beef, but when times get harder and they’ve needed to intensify they’ve opted for other crops like … dairy and vegetables.
– On squirrels and nuts, those are interesting observations Kathryn. I’ve put some effort into squirrel control this year, and it seems to have worked up to a point – we got 30kg of walnuts (dry in shells) from our two trees this year. You just have to get to the ones on the ground before night falls and the badgers come out (lying in bed hearing the cracking of nutshells in the darkness nearby has been a galvanizing experience…)
– Finally, meant to mention that quite a few years ago I bought 500 litres of reconditioned chip fat for the tractor. But I used it too slowly and the last 50l turned into unusable goop. Plus the slightly fraught process of changing fuel filters and bleeding the injectors got a bit too much. So then I got a tank of red diesel. Now I buy cans of white diesel at the garage, which keeps my fossil fuelled habits a bit more honest.
Oh, I definitely don’t think renewables can replace current fossil energy use… but I remain open to the possibility that they have some non-trivial role to play in a largely agrarian localist future. I think this is especially relevant around communications, though I wouldn’t like to make too many predictions about exactly how that will play out. The fossil age will end sooner or later, but we probably can’t put the information age back in the box.
A slightly sad anecdote: some of my farming ancestors in Saskatchewan, pre-electrification, used to use windmills to pump wellwater. When electrification was brought in, Sask Power would only connect a property to the grid if those windmills were removed.
@Kathryn
“Oh, I definitely don’t think renewables can replace current fossil energy use… but I remain open to the possibility that they have some non-trivial role to play in a largely agrarian localist future. I think this is especially relevant around communications”
I think that one of my concerns for renewables (PV, Wind Turbines) going forward, is that they are only possible because of global supply chains. Those supply chains being reliant on fossil fuels.
Once fossil fuels start to decline, then the supply chains start to contract too and we start to enter a “for the want of a nail” scenario.
I find it difficult to see how local industries will be able to create new renewables as many of the materials are not locally sourced and are from the other side of the world.
In the meantime, I can see a lot of “cannibalisation” of existing “kit” to keep some renewables working, but this will be for a limited time. And that’s if there are enough boffins around who know what they are doing.
I mean, if you really want to we can go around the houses yet again on things like global supply chains continuing to exist (they existed before fossil fuels, they were just orders of magnitude slower and more expensive) and whether we’re capable of producing enough spare calories to support a community of boffins (again, we managed this at several points in history before fossil fuels came along), but ultimately we’ll just have to wait and see. On the one hand, it’s clearly possible to have quite a lot of technology and specialisation without fossil fuels, and while materials may well become extremely scarce, the sheer amount of knowledge we now have has to count for something. The Romans had plumbing and built roads we’re still using today, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, climate instability and the ecological damage we’ve already done may well put a spanner into the works in terms of our ability to feed ourselves, particularly in certain locations which may or may not turn out to be strategic, and if I understand correctly, we haven’t really had a sharp and prolonged reduction in available exogenous energy on a worldwide scale before, so “hey, the Byzantine empire existed” (or whatever; you can pick your civilisation of choice, really, they come and go fairly frequently) doesn’t mean any culture will be able to pull it off again this time.
What I don’t think we’re going to be doing is using renewables to do much of the work that fossil fuels do now in food production, transport, and domestic heating and cooling. If we do have some access to renewable energy, it will probably be far too expensive to use on such mundane tasks.
@Kathryn
Yes, we seem to be going round in circles a bit here.
As you say, only time will tell if sail ships can keep global supply chains intact enough for localised agrarian communities to manufacture the infrastructure to “keep the lights on”, so to speak.
(Not quite sure what localised agrarian societies will have to offer in exchange for those raw materials?)
But what is possible in terms of tech and energy, shapes what a SFF will look like. It all comes down to how positive/pessimistic/naive one is, I guess.
Regarding knowledge/boffins in general…….
I think knowledge is a fragile thing that can be easily lost (or become irrelevant. Understanding how an internal combustion engine works doesn’t help if there is now petrol/diesel. Or knowing how to decommission a nuclear reactor if the machines to do the deconstruction aren’t available)
Been thinking about Humanure and composting toilets. (My latest obsession!!). The knowledge of germ theory has informed the practice of composting human shite.
Though beneficial to humanity, this knowledge is not widely known or understood and could easily be lost.
But then again, humanity has muddled along without composting toilets and has had to live with a high disease burden (the biggest of all animals on the planet) plus parasitic worms, for hundreds of thousands of years.
Xcel Energy is still at it. I don’t know if the article will be readable (paywall) but they are saying they can’t connect residential solar system to the grid unless the home owner pays to upgrade Xcel’s power lines, to the tune of $1 million.
https://replica.startribune.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=6640c440-55e1-43d4-bc7b-95adac281f44
‘Deep disappointment’ over Xcel’s new policy that restricts small solar
November 16, 2023
Jeff Wheeler, Star Tribune
The financial benefits of rooftop solar were part of Kenneth and JoAn Warwick’s retirement plan at their historic house in Faribault – once home to the inventor of the Tilt-A-Whirl.
So in 2021, they began the process of installing an array, spending $2,000 to remove a large maple tree in their yard and lining up a loan for initial costs.
But to hook up solar to the grid, Xcel suggested the family would need to pay an enormous sum: $1 million
https://www.redlakenationnews.com/story/2023/11/16/business/deep-disappointment-over-xcels-new-policy-that-restricts-small-solar/118287.html
Pretty good argument for off-grid solar, there.
Also a pretty good argument for not making “we’ll sell solar-generated electricity back to the grid, but first we’ll take out a loan to install the array” part of your retirement plan. Talk about counting your chickens before they’ve hatched!
Grid problems seem to be majorly getting in the way of the ‘energy transition’ dream.
From a recent IEA report:
“Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions”
“To achieve countries’ national energy and climate goals, the world’s
electricity use needs to grow 20% faster in the next decade than it did in the
previous one…”
“Reaching national goals also means adding or refurbishing a total of over
80 million kilometres of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the entire existing
global grid.”
“At least 3000 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power projects, of which
1500 GW are in advanced stages, are waiting in grid connection queues –
equivalent to five times the amount of solar PV and wind capacity added in
2022.”
https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-grids-and-secure-energy-transitions/executive-summary
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-one-visualization-2022/
The build out on top of these numbers ?
‘Obviously, that means that (almost) everybody needs access to some productive land of their own, which is a pretty tall order. But not, in my opinion, as tall as the idea that manufacturing high-energy bacterial food to feed people living high-energy lifestyles in high-energy cities is going to cut it as a long-term strategy in human ecology.’
I wonder how the folks on here who do have the privilege of ‘owning’ land and are currently enjoying the spoils of the present way of doing things, feel about sharing it out to a like minded self provisioning community. There is enormous propensity for missing the point when discussing how to best feed the soil, as that will have a thousand different ways that relate to context and aesthetic. The fact of sharing land is non negotiable for a livable future. I’d love to here some thoughts on that.
There are two things I like about the allotment system:
1) it isn’t horrendously expensive, because the land isn’t allowed to be used for other purposes
2) tenants (like myself) are not allowed to sell our produce or products made from it: that is, the land must be used for self-provisioning
I don’t own land myself, but if I did, I think I would be happy to rent out plots on a similar basis rather than let land go untended, as it almost certainly would if I had more than about half an acre and few or no power tools. (I currently tend a tenth of an acre plus one tiny churchyard and it is a real struggle to keep up, though that’s partly because geography is big and some of the land is further away than I’d like; I think livestock would be a huge help, but I would need more of the land to be nearby for that to work.)
Allotment committees are famously difficult, made up of people who have time to be on a committee and get some emotional reward from going to meetings. I largely steer clear of mine, partly because I have church committees to deal with, which are similar. Good governance of common resources at a parochial level is not easy, and I know Chris has acknowledged that several times. One thing I’m interested in is whether there are principles that can make good governance more likely, and — annoyingly pertinently for a church committee meeting I will be attending on Sunday — how to respond constructively when individual actors with moderate power at the local level make decisions that are contested. (In this case I don’t know whether it is short-term thinking, naivety, or a conflict of long-term goals that is the underlying issue, and I don’t want to get into the gnarly details here as it’s nothing to do with horticulture, but let’s just say that a decision I think should not have been made without much better consultation has made me hopping mad.)
@Kathryn
I think allotments are a good first step towards a SFF.
They seem like a good way for people who are inclined to grow some of their own food, getting access to land.
I read a proposal once (probably on this site) that, local councils could have an obligation by law, to provide allotments to anyone who wants one.
If the local council doesn’t have enough land to meet demand, that “compulsory renting” is enforced. Private land can be Commondeered by Councils. The allotment fees going to the land owner.
The allotments could then be scaled up at a later date, to increase to a homestead size.
Good question. I’m hoping to write at more length about this in the future, but here in brief are some of the things we’ve done on our site:
– created an area of allotments for local people to grow their own fruit & veg
– allocated another area to be used by an educational co-op who do activities with kids and various categories of other people in need
– provided residential space for people with their own vans/caravans to live on site, work offsite & contribute to onsite life
– provide onsite accommodation and work experience for people in the market garden
– raised livestock jointly with other people living both onsite & offsite
– started to establish a collective ‘staples’ growing project (potatoes, wheat, beans, squash, onions) with a group of people comprising onsite & offsite dwellers
– shared wood from the woodland we planted with people from offsite and (mostly) onsite
– made the site available when possible for people wanting outdoor space for events, meetings, courses, craft activities
It hasn’t always been easy! But hopefully I’ll say more about that another time.
Yes, Steve L, and I think Chris’s list starts to form the basis of a structure around truly ‘regenerative’ or ‘organic’ farming practices (being rooted in social and economic paradigms beyond ‘clean food’ and capitalistic bottom lines). I agree, the way of farming should absolutely be determined by the ‘owner’ in as much as they are performing the role of guardian of the resources (this quickly becomes a common resource) and on some level connected to this prosocial defintion of regenerative. I’m interested in this thorny issue because it establishes people’s ‘feelings’ about “their’ land which will be the ‘tall order’ that Chris talks about. With everything as it is, we are unlikely to see centralised power sharing out the land (the large tracts of land) – more likely it is process of grass roots individuals/family/community working it out – so (relatively) small land private owners sharing their land with those willing/able to join them in community provisioning.
Like you say you’ve worked hard to establish your plot – and it is heartening to hear your planning to open out in this way. My feeling is there are many people working equally hard – perhaps harder (!) To maintain essentially subsistence life styles within cities and towns and villages. Again, it is essential for us to be mindful of how we think this process of ruralisation will function and who is worthy of what and on what basis.
I was recently at family owned permaculture farm in North Wales where the farmer has been in consultation to open out the ownership of the farm – and was advised that it was rare for a family farm to do this – because of the feelings around it that you express. The farmer was also quite hopeful about the aristocratic/inherentence land owners being open to sharing land to small farmers/community provisioning.
Riverford is running a campaign to get supermarkets to pay small farms honestly, as many are saying they wont make the year. There is clearly a very slim margin for small farmers of any stripe within the present economic system, which will only get worse. What could emerge is a jump into community self provisioning, which would essentially cut out supermarkets and mortgage lenders.
Incidentally, I’d love to hear more about the staples project! Partly because three of those crops are ones I grow at the Far Allotment, but partly because “oh, but you can’t really grow significant calories with small-scale horticulture” is a criticism that is floating around out there, usually from people who don’t eat a lot of winter squash, dried beans, or spuds…
Joel wrote “…that will have a thousand different ways that relate to context and aesthetic. The fact of sharing land is non negotiable for a livable future.”
“Sharing land” has a variety of meanings and contexts, and Chris already listed some ways of doing it. I wonder whether Joel was mainly referring to the type of sharing implied by “land reform”, which could be more like forced sharing.
For reference, the first definition which popped up:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
land reform
noun
1. Measures, such as the division of large properties into smaller ones, that are taken to bring about a more equitable apportionment of agricultural land.
2. A redistribution of agricultural land (especially by government action).
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition )
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The most likely candidates for “a more equitable apportionment” seem to be large holdings of land. The least likely candidates seem to be owner-occupied-and-used plots which were acquired and “improved” via the hard-earned savings and onsite work of the owner-occupiers.
Regarding Joel’s “thousand different ways [of land usage] that relate to context and aesthetic”, who decides then? I see ownership as granting a right to decide. The costs of ownership are somewhat compensated by the accompanying rights to decide which are granted to the owners (within the options allowed by the laws of the wider community).
Beyond “land reform” there are many opportunities for owner-occupiers to share with non-owners, such as those listed by Chris, and I welcome more opportunities to share the small plot I co-own (and its produce) with others.
A couple clarifications, after reading Joel’s reply (above).
What I wrote about the least-likely candidates for land reform (as defined above) was meant to apply to “Chris’s” land as well as to “my” quarter-acre vacant lot.
A comparison as an analogy:
Buying an old bicycle with savings from scrimping
vs
having a newer bicycle given to someone by a wealthy relative.
Putting in lots of time, effort, and additional hard-earned savings to fix up the bicycle, and then use it as an important part of one’s daily life,
vs
leaving the bicycle in storage, unused.
Which bicycle is a better candidate for sharing?
Of course, the old bike could still be shared (like the clothes on one’s back could be shared with someone in greater need), but all those unused bikes could be put to good use as well, to make a more significant and lasting reduction in the widespread greater need.
When I wrote about how the owner is the decider, “owner” definitely includes the possibility of collective ownership (which I prefer).
My ideal for long-lasting (theoretically in perpetuity) collective ownership of land (in our current legal system) is a community land trust. The biggest hurdle is the initial acquisition of the land, which is typically relinquished from individual ownership (via a land donation from existing owners or pooled individual resources) and put into a trust that the community owns (instead of individual entities).
Purchasing a house with an adjacent vacant lot was a Plan B for my family. I had hoped to pool resources with other people to start a community land trust somewhere, but circumstances prevented that, mostly due to a lack of enough like-minded people willing to commit.
I fully agree Steve, in the land reform model, the land trust structure and I am working towards to the land as we speak and may end up exactly where you are! It’s disheartening to find so few people in your locality who are willing to join.
Thanks for your insights.
Thanks for this very interesting little sub-discussion. I think there’s a fruitful tension between Joel’s and Steve’s comments. I agree with Joel on the general need to unlock the benefits of landownership and share them more widely, but I think Steve is right to raise the issue of the costs to ownership which doesn’t get as much airtime as I believe it should. I’ve been planning to write an essay about this along the lines of ‘the moral economy of the landlord’.
Re the staples project, I’ll report more if and when it gets going. Perhaps it’s misnamed inasmuch as the very word ‘staples’ is something of a confidence trick worked against the local agrarian exactly along the lines Kathryn relates. I want to say ‘oh but you can grow significant calories … and actual food as well’