Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on December 9, 2023 | 81 Comments
In a couple of weeks, my wife and maybe me will be packing and delivering the last veg boxes ever to issue from Vallis Veg, the business partnership she and I established in 2008, and we will be closing the business down. It won’t, I hope, be the last time any produce is grown or sold on our site, as I’ll explain below. Indeed, we’re excited about the new projects on the site that running the market garden has held us back from developing. But it will be the last time we sell produce under present business arrangements. Ironically, the business is costing us too much, and it can’t continue in its existing form.
It’s ironic partly because a business isn’t supposed to exact costs upon its proprietors, but to deliver benefits. Sadly, that’s scarcely the case for all too many people working in the global food system. We’re very far from the most disadvantaged among them, but it applies to us too – and to many other growers in the UK, especially small-scale local ones oriented to organic or agroecological production. The reasons for this are structural and global, and will be familiar to anyone who knows much about the food system or regularly reads this blog. But I’ll say a little more about them in a moment.
It’s also ironic because I’ve heard there are some comments circulating on Twitter that criticise me for our labour practices at Vallis Veg. Apparently, they suggest something along the lines that I lead a life of leisured ease built on profits accrued from unfair exploitation of other people’s labour in our market garden. Now, anybody who thinks one can build a life of leisured ease based on the profits – however ill-gotten – from an acre or so of vegetables in modern Britain clearly has no clue about the workings of the food system. Certainly, our business bank account isn’t corroborating this tall tale.
I believe the tale’s originators are a pair of Marxist academics who’ve been beefing with me for a few years now. I think it’s fair to say we’re not big fans of one another. I blocked them on Twitter a while back (the only people where I’ve ever felt that need) and I’m not going to unblock and read what they’ve written. Still, the wider issues concerning food, land and labour are important, and in view of the present historical moment on our farm and in the world it seems opportune to discuss them. Hopefully, the below will dispel the untruths apparently circulating about me. But, y’know … whatever. People will think what they think, and haters are always gonna hate.
Let’s start with the story of our little farm – something I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. I can hardly do it justice in a single essay, even one as long as this, but I’ll lay down a few markers.
Like many people of our age and background, my wife and I have been lucky beneficiaries of the housing market. Like rather fewer, we parlayed our good fortune into an agrarian lifestyle. Reading the runes on climate, food and energy futures, I gave up my well-paid job in academia and in 2003 we bought a parcel of semi-improved bare pastureland in northeast Somerset for some tens of thousands of pounds. In 2008, we started selling veg boxes from the small market garden we’d established on the site, trading as Vallis Veg, with me working full-time as the main grower, which I did for about five years.
I found it hard to establish a viable market garden from scratch, without a farming background, while living offsite and helping raise young kids. The work was rewarding to the spirit in many ways but in the end I got pretty burned out by it. Looking back, the problem was partly my own attitude. Having worked for the previous fifteen years or so in salaried, career-ladder type jobs, I imported something of the attitude that tends to go with them – that I was an important person who the world owed a living. One of the best learnings I’ve got from being a small business proprietor is that I’m not an important person and the world doesn’t owe me a living. The world made that pretty plain as soon as I got started in market gardening, but it’s a lesson I keep learning in new ways. It’s helped propel me down a political path of agrarian populism, civic republicanism and distributism (and of appreciating the parallels with much indigenous thinking) that contrast sharply with Marxism, market liberalism and other kinds of collective modernist politics. But more on that another time.
One clue to the difficulties I faced, if I hadn’t been too naïve to see it, is that almost nobody works in small-scale, local, agroecological market gardening in Britain and most other rich countries. There’s a reason for that. I’m not saying it’s impossible to make it work at some level. There are people who do. Usually, they have good farming skills, good business skills, good people skills, an appetite for relentless hard work, a passion for farming, not too many other distractions in their lives and an easygoing attitude to earning a low income. It’s a rare combination, and I don’t possess enough of those qualities across the board. But even people better equipped than me often struggle to make it work.
Anyway, after five years as a grower, I stepped back from it. In recent years, I’ve helped out in the market garden occasionally and done some of the background work on the wider holding that helps support it – plumbing, machinery work, woodland management, general odd jobs and so on. Increasingly, I’ve got drawn into writing about human ecological futures and the role of farming within it (writing is another low-income sector. I seem to be drawn to them). This blog and subsequent writings basically emerged as an attempt to make sense of the experience.
As I stepped back from the market garden, my wife – who’s a better grower, businessperson and people person than me – stepped into it. We’d established a modest reputation in the local community as people who were trying to do something interesting and worthwhile on our land. The market garden, she rightly pointed out, was at the heart of them, and she went about trying to build out a community-oriented project from that – but always on the basis of our small private business partnership, largely because we found the bureaucratic inertia, grant dependence and organisational unwieldiness of larger social enterprises unappealing.
Instead, we’ve gone down the route of more local, ad hoc arrangements – for example, creating allotments for local people to grow food on our land, and hosting the excellent educational project Shared Earth Learning. My wife also set up a small campsite on our holding, with secluded pitches and firepits along the lines of the kind of campsites she’d always wanted to stay at. The campsite has been quite successful, albeit a bit less so now that more farmers are realising that if you’re going to farm live animals, humans are by far the best-paying livestock.
Such diversification schemes are ubiquitous in agriculture but, leaving them aside, most UK growers opt either to mechanize and grow on a larger scale (often attracting various explicit and implicit subsidies), or else to grow a handful of high-value crops intensively on a small scale, and typically purchasing the bulk of their inputs. Push the logic of those approaches and you get the basic twin structure of the wider UK horticulture industry. Either crops grown in the UK on Grade 1 land with arable-style techniques, usually with farm subsidies and the implicit subsidies of heavy mechanization and fossil fuel use. Or crops grown with a lot of human labour, which is an expensive input in the UK. So this latter route usually involves either importing crops from abroad where labour is cheaper, or importing the labour itself, typically in the form of temporary labourers from abroad.
Smaller scale agroecological growers essentially have to replicate or work their way around that structure as best they can. It’s worth looking at George Monbiot’s account of Iain Tolhurst’s operation in his Regenesis book, or at Ben Hartman’s The Lean Micro Farm – both justly celebrated growers – for a sense of how this works. Despite what I hope it’s not too unkind to call the Jean-Martin Fortier moment, the idea that even the best growers make much money from vegetable sales really doesn’t float. They might be able to afford a few staff (often part-time) on low wages, and maybe make the equivalent of something like minimum wage themselves if they’re lucky.
In my view, neither of these horticultural approaches is likely to persist long into the small farm future that awaits as a result of climate change, energy descent and a bunch of other drivers. But for numerous reasons I think it’s better to have small local farms trying to survive in the present economic climate and do what they can to make them resilient and pro-ecological than not to have them. For fifteen years, we’ve tried to square that circle as best we can at Vallis Veg, mostly by following the small-scale, labour-intensive route, but focused around a wide range of seasonal veg with more emphasis on learning and community-building than profits.
What emerged from those efforts as we tried to build a small farm community on our site was the development of another local, ad hoc arrangement – a two-year learning opportunity that we offered in small-scale agroecological horticulture. It’s quite a big step up from working as an apprentice or employee on an agroecological market garden to running one yourself as your own business, and it’s widely noted that there’s a dearth of skills training in the sector – on the business side of things as well as on the growing side. The Soil Association ran an apprentice scheme for a few years, but it came to an end because too few growers could afford the wage bill. The Land Workers’ Alliance has worked more informally with growers to try to develop best possible practices around training and apprenticeships, and we shared our ideas with them.
Our scheme involved giving aspiring growers the chance to get a feel for running their own market garden without taking on the full business and financial risks of establishing their own enterprise from scratch. In the first year, people would learn all aspects of the business by working part-time on them with some instruction from the second year people and from us. In the second year, they’d run the box scheme as if it were their own business, albeit taking major decisions in discussion with us. We changed the terms and benefits of the scheme over the years. Initially, we asked for a 24-hour week in the first year with a stipend of £100 per week plus free accommodation, services and other in-kind benefits. In the second year, the grower(s) received 90% of the net takings from the business, with similar in-kind benefits, the balance of 10% (about 5% of gross income) coming to us as rent – more on rent in a moment. So not a wage in the second year, but a large share of the business income that it was substantially the incumbent’s responsibility to generate. In this last year of operation, we asked for at least 24 hours of work input per week with a £70 stipend plus free accommodation, services and other in-kind benefits for people in the first year of the scheme.
A lot of market gardens offer some mix of income and in-kind benefits like this, though none to our knowledge exactly like our scheme. I’m pretty sure that the people on our scheme were better off financially than if they’d tried to pay market rates for local housing, energy and other services and food out of a 24 hour per week market wage.
The project was never about earning a lot of money (we wouldn’t have chosen the horticulture sector if that had been a key motivation). And so it’s proved. My wife and I have averaged a joint annual income of £5,500 from the market garden over the last ten years. This year, we will probably earn a joint income of £2,500-3,000 for at least six months of one full-time equivalent labour input on our part. My wife put a lot of work into developing the learning opportunity and into teaching and managing people. While not expecting to earn much money from it, we did want the project to wash its face without subsidies from elsewhere. But it’s proved unfeasible on various fronts, including the rewards to our own labour time, and ultimately the model hasn’t really worked. Hence, in part, the decision to close it down.
I could write a book about the ins and outs of the market garden over the last fifteen years, and the two-year learning scheme we’ve trialled in the last few of them. Maybe someday I will. For now, I’ll just say that some veg was grown, some lessons were learned, some fun was had, and some of the people who passed through the scheme went on to get jobs in the sector they may not otherwise have got. Ultimately, we couldn’t transcend the constraints of food system economics, and some of the assumptions around work, rent and reward in wider society. We tried to make something happen that seemed worthwhile. It didn’t work out, but I’m happy that we tried. I don’t expect or need anyone’s sympathy about its failure, but it was a genuine attempt to create something useful, which cost us rather than made us richer. I don’t accept there was anything venal or exploitative about it on our part.
Perhaps it’s worth wrangling with a few numbers around commercial vegetable growing in relation to this. Suppose somebody is employed in a market garden at £12/hour (that, incidentally, is the basic rate we pay for unskilled labour in the campsite business, which can afford to pay it). Let’s say that their employer’s overheads are 40%, and let’s also say that the employer spends 5 minutes out of each hour they work teaching them skills or managing them, also paying themselves £12/hour for this work. This means that just for the employer to break even, the employee needs to generate £17.80 of vegetable sales for each hour they work. Looking in the shops today, I found prices for lettuces (from Spain) of 75p per item and parsnips (from Lincolnshire) of £1.40/kg. Suppose you can earn half as much again for local agroecological produce. That would mean that in every 7-hour day they worked, a grower’s employee would need to produce and sell the equivalent of about 60kg of parsnips or about 110 lettuces if the employer is to get even zero financial benefit rather than a negative return from employing them.
That’s quite a tall order for a small agroecological enterprise without much mechanization. The skilled and hardworking East European migrant workers historically employed in the industry might pull it off. I’m not sure I or the other people working here did.
One way around this is to look to decommodify the enterprise and focus as much as possible around other benefits. In practice, every society worth the name involves a plethora of personal relationships, voluntary agreements and complex motivations (I’ve just returned, for example, from visiting a relative who’s been working in an unpaid voluntary position for the Government, with a view to building his skills and connections). At Vallis Veg, we wanted to build a good community around the site, and we’ve endlessly discussed, negotiated and tweaked arrangements accordingly. Initially, we charged allotment holders £1 per year per plot, and we offered people working here rent-free accommodation. But in so doing, we weren’t placing much value on our own work and time input into the site, and that made it easy for other people not to value it either. Lately, we’ve become a little more insistent on recognition of that input in the arrangements we make. I won’t go into all the details of that here, but I’d like to say something about the nature of rent, which pertains to it, and which I think is often misunderstood.
Rent comes in different forms. ‘Economic rent’ refers to situations when a good or service commands a higher price than a normal market one because it’s subject to monopoly control. Land is subject to economic rent, because it’s a limited good. Liquid capital isn’t intrinsically limited in the same way, at least in the short run, but tends to get monopolized for other reasons – not least its investment in land, pushing up prices. This kind of rent is unearned speculative gain. It’s what we used to buy our land, through no major input of labour on our part – a sad reality of land access in contemporary Britain. A lot of economic thinking suggests people should not be able to make a financial gain out of speculative economic rent, and I agree. My book A Small Farm Future was unreservedly critical of economic rent. I don’t think anybody should have to pay a landowner anything just because they own land.
Here’s a picture of me planting trees on our site circa 2004, back in the days when I had long hair (actually, the word ‘long’ is an unnecessary qualifier).
The grassy area you see behind me now features, among other things, a fruit orchard, mature shelterbelts, a house, a track, a water supply and drainage system, composting toilets, hot showers, electricity generating equipment, an array of useful electrical gizmos and a well-stocked woodshed. Every one of those things was planned, paid for, project managed and in many cases put in place directly by my wife and/or me.
Here’s a drone shot of the holding from a few years ago, which hopefully gives a sense of the changes we’ve made under our ownership as we’ve diversified the site from those typical of the surrounding landscape.
Now, if I charge rent to somebody who stays in my house, using the hot water, or the fridge, or the track, or … the list goes on … that I’ve provided, this would not be economic rent, but rent as a return to my labour, just as a wage I might pay to that person for working on the land would be a return to theirs. A lot of people don’t seem to understand this point, perhaps because modern property rents – the kind of thing you pay to your landlord for a flat in the city – are so dominated by economic rent. However, if you’re living in a dwelling I’ve built myself on my land and you’re working as a grower on it, there’s no reason to disregard my labour to produce the dwelling as against your labour to produce the vegetables.
Further, habitable dwellings require upkeep. The pipe starts leaking, the walls need repainting, the drains need clearing, the electricity supply needs fixing, whatever (there’s quite a lot more of this kind of work on an offgrid farmstead, where the remit of energy or water companies runs less than it does in town). If I have to call in a professional tradesperson working in the wider economy to do any such work, their bill will be a minimum of £50 per hour – that’s an extra 45 lettuces or 24kg of parsnips I’d need to produce on top of the break-even wageworker output to fund an hour’s work from the tradesperson, which will need to be charged out somehow against the income from the site. The unpromising economics of all this soon start stacking up.
Talking of drains, during the long days I spent installing our water systems I inadvertently sliced through old clay field drains a couple of times that then had to be repaired. Apparently, these drains were mostly installed by Napoleonic prisoners of war, presumably working in conditions of near slavery. Once we start counting the embodied labour in a landscape, it runs pretty deep – figuratively and sometimes literally.
Anyway, point is, if you accept the distinction between economic and ordinary rent (you may not … I’ll come to that), then leaving aside the ground (economic) rent of buying the bare land in the first place, there’s an awful lot of my own and my wife’s labour embodied in this place. I think it’s legitimate for us to charge some of that out to people using the things our labour has provided.
However, if we’d done that proportionately to our labour input, the rent would probably far exceed what anybody could realistically earn by growing and selling vegetables from the site. So we didn’t do that. All the same, I’d like to put it out there that my labour and my wife’s labour does not count for less than the labour of other people growing vegetables here.
Now, you could say we’re the fools for spending our time and money on ‘improvements’ whose cost can’t be covered by the returns from the activities they enable. That’s how normal market economics works, incentivising the most remunerative uses of a resource. By those lights, we should probably have set up a horse livery, or a dirt bike track or a paintball playground … or, indeed, a campsite. That’s why a survey of local landscapes will reveal more of such things than small-scale agroecological market gardens, and why it’s easier to earn money running a campsite than a market garden. (Actually, part of that ease has to do with economic rent – I think we’re more vulnerable to criticism about unfair practices on our site in relation to the campsite than the market garden, but nobody seems to mind the economic rent charged by the hospitality industry. Possibly this has to do with the fact that the entire UK and global economy and most of the jobs associated with it are propped up by economic rent, as I’ll discuss further in a moment. Those in glasshouses…)
The trouble is, you can’t eat the products of a horse livery or a campsite (well, I guess you can eat horses, but not if you want to stay in the livery business for long). In my opinion, normal market economics is incentivising the wrong things. I think its preference for horse liveries or campsites over vegetables and other local food production will lead us to disaster (you can make a similar argument around energy-intensive arable cropping).
Meanwhile, although the fields around our town provide severely limited types and quantities of food for local consumption, the local shops are crammed with every imaginable foodstuff from around the world, if you can afford to pay for it.
The way this works in the fossil-fuelled modern economy is that wherever in the world can be found the cheapest assemblage of land, labour, energy and capital to produce a given food commodity, that will be a preferential site of its production. And that is why the world has become ever more reliant on the vulnerable breadbaskets of the continental grassland regions for their grains, why poor farmers can’t afford to produce local staple crops but get drawn into growing commodity cash crops that put them at risk of hunger and greater poverty, why tropical forests are razed for soya, beef and palm oil, and why in rich countries like Britain where fossil energy is cheap and human labour is dear we overproduce arable grain crops and (whisper it) ruminant meat, and underproduce fruit and vegetables, which we import from Spain or further afield.
This also explains why it’s a lot easier to run a local campsite than a local market garden. Whereas food can be produced wherever in the world is suggested by the land-labour-energy-capital nexus and moved to the consumer, the same cannot be said of campsites, bed and breakfasts, pheasant shoots and fishing ponds. Farm diversification is the name of the game. Until people actually need food.
Given the perversity of market incentives, you could opt instead for a non-market system based on state ownership of all land – no private property, no private businesses or entrepreneurs. This still seems to be the preferred model for some people on the left. To my mind, it’s an ideal that’s never existed in practice, and it’s never panned out well when governments have tried to implement it. But that’s a discussion for another time. The more important point is that even with that model, you still have to find ways to appropriately apply finite reserves of land, energy, capital and labour to produce food and other necessities of life to be consumed. You don’t escape from the basic dilemmas of production and consumption simply by socialising or nationalising them.
My thinking, and hopefully our future practices on the farm, has gone in the other direction – not aggregating the means of production, as with the collectivist approaches of communism and corporate welfare capitalism, but distributing them. This doesn’t escape from the basic dilemmas of production and consumption either, but by bringing production and consumption into closer moral relationship with one another – often in the body of the same person – it makes them a bit less intractable.
Inasmuch as it’s true that I have the leisure to sit around writing books and essays like this, I’ve argued that it’s not because I’ve exploited the labour of people growing vegetables on our site. Nor do I make much money from writing. Our campsite makes a bit of money, but our household income is usually well below the national average.
So how do I fund my leisured, writerly existence? Largely by being my own landlord, and my own service provider. I pay no rent or mortgage, no energy bills in our off-grid house, and limited food bills because we produce a lot of our own food.
I’m lucky. This is an option open to few. But it could be open to many more via a distributist politics that altered the nature of property rights, and made land widely available. Granted, if most people were living like this, I’d have less time for writing. I think we’re moving rapidly towards a future of low energy localism in which the best option is for most people to live like this, in the sense of spending more of their time producing food, fibre and energy from local land over which they have household appropriation rights of some kind. There are worse options. For now, I use some of the free time available to me to make the case for this best option, and against worse ones.
Worse ones in my opinion are to follow modernist politics in its full Marxist or market liberal logic. Commodify everything, the argument goes, and good things will follow – either from economic growth and the division of labour or a revolutionary Marxist upheaval of the commodity form that will result in … well, it’s not quite clear. Nor is it clear to me how further ramifying waged employment and its quantified production of alienated commodities across every aspect of society will prepare the ground for its overthrow in favour of that better thing, whatever it is. This is a phantasm of Marxist dialectics that even Marx himself eventually abandoned.
A while back on this site, I quoted Alistair MacIntyre “When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy”. What MacIntyre proposes instead is “the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages that are already upon us” (After Virtue, pp.262-3). That’s pretty much where I’m at.
Justifying her government’s economic policies, former British prime minister Theresa May notoriously said “there isn’t a magic money tree”. While her statement isn’t strictly true in the case of rich-country governments or private banks, which do have ways of magicking up more money, it is true of small farms. So while it may have been great to pay the people working on our farm, and ourselves, more money, that wasn’t really on the cards. We did our best to decommodify within reason, and offer other in-kind benefits.
Still, at a deeper level I’d concede there is a magic money tree underlying our ability to create food and other kinds of wellbeing on our holding within the inevitable confines of the modern economy. Histories of racialized capitalism, ecocidal extractivism, even the labours of Napoleonic prisoners, are enabling conditions for the relatively easy lives that everyone who’s lived and worked on our site have enjoyed.
The same, however, is true of almost every other kind of work and worker in contemporary Britain. One example is the emerging trend for people far richer than me to buy landholdings and employ well remunerated staff to curate the grounds, the walled vegetable gardens and so on in service of therapeutic retreats, high end restaurants and suchlike, far beyond the compass of any sustainable agrarian economy. Who wouldn’t opt for such well-paid work compared to the vicissitudes of running your own market garden business? Whether that work lights the path to a fairer and more sustainable future is another matter.
Another example is academia. The worker in the increasingly corporatized university – hugely well paid by global standards – with its pension schemes and its exorbitant fee schedules (shouldn’t the university be paying the student for their labour?) draws from the magic money tree of racialized capitalism and ecocidal extractivism as well, however radical their words, while teaching courses I suspect will often prove of questionable value in the world to come, except in the short-term scramble for graduate jobs that water the tree yet more. I’m glad I’m out of academia now and doing something more useful.
Something more useful. Next year, veg will still be produced and sold from our market garden by two young growers who are starting their own business on the existing market garden – but it will be their business, not ours. They have lots of ideas about what they want to do, and were drawn to our site because of its ready-to-go infrastructure and loyal customer list. Some people, at least, are able to recognise the virtues of embodied labour when they see it. I wish them every success.
For our part, we’ll still be growing food and wood for ourselves and the wider community, including new shared projects for producing staple vegetables and livestock with local people (no wages involved!) We’re looking forward to focusing more upon community self-reliance than commercial production. Hopefully, my wife will have more time to do the community mediation and restorative work that she’s pursued when she can in recent years. I think that kind of work is going to be ever more vital in the future. And hopefully Shared Earth Learning and the allotment group will carry on doing their things and the site will continue to produce food, fibre and local human connection.
I’m planning to feed in as best I can to all of that, and to continue to write … if there are still people interested in reading what I have to say. But for now, I’ve had my fill of aggressive men impugning my character online. Also, my mother has just died, and I feel the need to spend some time dealing with the practical and emotional consequences of that. So I’m going to take a break from writing and blogging until January, and may not engage much or at all in any discussions arising from this post.
It’s customary at this time of year for me to mention the payment button on this site, in case you’re minded to offer me a seasonal tip for providing all the content I’ve made freely available here. If you’re unpersuaded by my analysis above, maybe you’ll consider that a cheeky request. Whatever the case, thanks to regular readers and to commenters for your wonderful and stimulating conversations on this site over the last year. I hope to be back in the new year to finish off discussions of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, and onwards from there to topics new. Ciao.
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That all rings very true.
I wouldn’t count it as a failure. Twenty years is a good run for any small vegetable farm. A lot of learning, discovery and pride of accomplishment has come out of it.
You could have spent the time working indoors for somebody else, hating every minute of it.
I am sorry to hear about your mother Chris. We are in the dark months, the dying of the year, and I hope you will have abundant time by the fire to honour what should be honoured, and mourn what should be mourned. Take care.
I’m sorry for your loss, Chris; I hope the break will do your spirit good.
I accept the distinction between economic rents and ordinary rents, though I think it is often in the interests of rentiers to paint the former as the latter. (For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think you are doing so here.) This makes me wonder, too, about the distinction between commodity crops and subsistence crops — or maybe we could call them “economic” crops and “ordinary” crops. So I pay an ordinary rent (more or less) for my allotment plots, and I’m only permitted to grow ordinary crops — nothing for commercial sale. If I had to pay an economic rent for the allotment then I simply couldn’t afford to do it — likely it would be unaffordable even if I could sell the produce.
My lower-labour crops on the Far Allotment are, sortof, a shared staple crop arrangement, I guess, insofar as both the labour and produce are shared with a friend who lives a bit closer and can chuck some water on them from time to time in the hotter, drier parts of summer. The arrangement is very informal and was born more out of the practicality of being just a bit too far away to grow crops that need more attention than anything else. I will be interested to read more about your own staple project as it progresses.
I really don’t understand your aversion to subsidies, Chris. Would you have not benefited from a payment of 5000 or so a month to pay yourselves and your farm workers a decent wage? Subsidies are meant to encourage good things like small scale farms. Incentivising large scale industrial farming and the wider fossil fuel economy that underpins it all with taxpayer’s money is quite frankly corrupt. Moving away from industrial farmscapes requires negative incentives, such as higher fertiliser prices. Without farmers and farm workers we would all starve. I’m afraid I don’t get the logic of paying farm workers nothing but a room and some vegetables or a bare minimum of 9 euros an hour. Meanwhile people in cities are sitting behind computer screens in offices doing god knows what and earning in the hundreds of thousands. Must be an element of “bullshit jobs” logic in there… Anyway I’m pretty sure a larger scale transition to a small farm future will require actual natural resource managers funded by the government working on these things directly in the field.
Richard
What makes you think that “actual natural resource managers funded by the government working on these things directly in the field” will somehow be better at managing resources and the transition to a small farm future than the people who already live on, tend, and make their livelihood from the land?
As for subsidies, I can’t speak for Chris, but I suspect there’s precious little available for the kind of small farms that we need; there’s certainly a lot, directly and indirectly, for extractive industrial monoculture farming. Perhaps if that situation were reversed Chris would feel differently about subsidies in general, but I’m not sure how we get there from here.
Really don’t understand your comment. Are you saying we are living in a small farm society already? Right now farmers are overproducing and underpricing their goods, and producing negative spillover effects such runoff, salinity and biodiversity loss on third parties. We need natural resource managers working together with government officials to internalise the externalities through extension services, positive incentives to plant food trees with livestock and increase fertiliser prices, for example. Like I said, subsidies are only ever meant to encourage good, positive behaviour like small scale farming and not industrial farming, cafos and so on. Most of the vegetable growing in a small farm future should ideally be farmers growing homestead gardens for themselves, centered around basic staples like potatoes, onions, and carrots. Large scale market gardens run for profit are far too space extensive and labour intensive for the little calories they provide. But I wonder why natural resource management is even taught at universities then if they are not needed apparently.
I think we must be talking at cross-purposes, Richard.
I certainly don’t think we are already in a small farm future!
I am confused by your statements about subsidies. I don’t think subsidies have the effects you say they are “only ever meant to”.
I mean subsidies are there for beneficial activities that are needed more of in society — skilled smallholders in this case. Cars for example in their current numbers in cities are not necessary for survival and create negative externalities such as air and noise pollution, therefore require negative incentives such as higher fuel prices, more expensive parking etc.
Going forward, I think there will definitely be a need for people (probably coordinated by government) to go out and teach the skills required for people to learn to grow food.
The vast majority don’t have a clue (me included) how to create a small farm future and we won’t have the luxury of learning from our mistakes.
John
There’s a lot to be said for doing some learning now while you can afford to make mistakes.
How are is the rocket stove project going?
@Kathryn
Alas, I haven’t found the time to get the rocket stove out and fired up for a while.
I’ve made all the tweeks to get it to run on wood pellets or twiglits, I just haven’t tried it out.
Been distracted by life and other projects. (Biochar retorts etc. I haven’t actually fired up the retort either!!!!! I can see a pattern developing!!!)
You prompted me to put it on my to-do list.
Perhaps over Christmas, would be a good time.
I’ll let you know how I get on.
I’ve also been making biochar in the wood burner by filling tins (stainless steel) with twigs/chippings. The tins have sealable lids with a small hole in the lid. The contents gasify and are ignited as the exit through the hole in the lid.
What’s left in the tin after all the gases have burnt off is biochar!!!!
It’s a great way to heat the house using twigs/chippings and the byproduct is biochar. And it’s a very clean burn as it’s gas that being combusted.
It’s a win win.
Relying on more government subsidies (and the bureaucracies required to implement and manage them) may imply more centralized control and even more taxation, while “A Small Farm Future” as envisioned in the book is a more localized approach (within supersedure states, for example).
Perhaps as global transport costs increase, local foods can command higher prices which potentially eliminate the need for income support of local farmers. Consumers who can’t afford the higher food prices could then get some income support (instead of the farmers).
The current EU Common Agricultural Policy support for farmers amounts to roughly 60 billion euros per year (2019). This represents less than 400 euros per hectare of land used for agricultural production. “Income support” subsidies are approximately two-thirds of this budget, or roughly 250 euros per hectare, on average.
This current level of funding (presumably coming from taxes), resulting in only 250 euros of income support per hectare, wouldn’t provide much support for a couple of farmers working on less than 5 hectares, for example. (About two-thirds of the agricultural holdings in the EU in 2020 were less than 5 hectares.)
https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/common-agricultural-policy/cap-overview/cap-glance_en
“EU farms used 157 million hectares of land for agricultural production in 2020, 38 % of the total land area of the EU.”
“There were 9.1 million agricultural holdings in the EU in 2020, about two-thirds (63.8 %) of which were less than 5 ha in size.”
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Farms_and_farmland_in_the_European_Union_-_statistics
All I’m saying is that if we value a healthy biosphere we should pay small scale farmers who are doing the right thing and not encourage more industrial farming. If subsidies are already being disbursed in the billions how can this result in even more centralised control and bureaucracy as you say? Moreover right now farmers are losing most of their income to supermarkets, transportation, marketing and packaging companies and this leads to overproduction and further drops in cash going to farmers. The proportion of of the dollar going to farmers is the important thing and not the end cost at the supermarket, whether it is more expensive or not.
I agree that if we’re going to have subsidies, they should go to small-scale farmers rather than financialised industrial extractive monocropping.
I don’t think that is what current subsidies are actually doing, though.
“This also explains why it’s a lot easier to run a local campsite than a local market garden.”
Chris,
The mind boggles at how many ways you tried to come up with different schemes to both make the farm profitable. But, from where I sit on this very rainy Sunday, it sure sounds like you and your wife explored every possible path to make a go of it. And that you were obsessively creative in trying to ke
And the above sentence had me nodding in understanding. So, many farms in our area have turned to agro-tourism (which a campsite falls under) to sustain. At least it allows families to still stay on their own land. Although many in our area are nothing more than event venues for the well-heeled (weddings seemingly the biggest attractions).
And please accept our condolences on the loss of your mother.
My best,
Brian
Some of my reply got cut off:
“And that you were obsessively creative in trying to keep the community involved. So much different than our own approach. So, a middle finger to any critics.”
Really don’t understand your comment. Are you saying we are living in a small farm society already? Right now farmers are overproducing and underpricing their goods, and producing negative spillover effects such runoff, salinity and biodiversity loss on third parties. We need natural resource managers working together with government officials to internalise the externalities through extension services, positive incentives to plant food trees with livestock and increase fertiliser prices, for example. Like I said, subsidies are only ever meant to encourage good, positive behaviour like small scale farming and not industrial farming, cafos and so on. Most of the vegetable growing in a small farm future should ideally be farmers growing homestead gardens for themselves, centered around basic staples like potatoes, onions, and carrots. Large scale market gardens run for profit are far too space extensive and labour intensive for the little calories they provide. But I wonder why natural resource management is even taught at universities then if they are not needed apparently.
It strikes me that people can be quite vocal about the hospitality industry — when it is seen as driving up rents in urban areas. (Look at Airbnb and Edinburgh, for example).
But I think those very high urban rents, whether ordinary or economic, are part of a wider picture of enclosure and consolidation of land (or even landed capital?) and an erosion of usufruct rights over the past several centuries. If more of us had the option of five acres and a cow, higher urban rents wouldn’t necessarily result in the amount of hardship and homelessness that they do.
Also, I appreciate your honesty.
There are a lot of people out there selling mostly-online courses on how to make a living homesteading who neglect to mention that they only manage to make a living homesteading by… selling courses about it, or perhaps having a spouse in a more lucrative career.
It seems to me that you had the good fortune to get hold of some land, made a really good go of it, and still needed to subsidise the market garden with the campsite. That speaks volumes about the starting context for a transition to more small farms, more self-provisioning households, and more local markets.
“There are a lot of people out there selling mostly-online courses on how to make a living homesteading who neglect to mention that they only manage to make a living homesteading by… selling courses about it, or perhaps having a spouse in a more lucrative career. ” Couldn’t agree more!
My guess is that Richard has never made a living farming. I could be wrong…
Subsidies are part of politics. And the way politics work is that the biggest and most powerful players make the rules to benefit themselves.
The vast amount of agricultural subsidies go to the largest farms. For small scale vegetable growers there is little or nothing beyond recovering the cost of your seeds. That does not go very far in an already bad year.
https://www.ewg.org/research/updated-ewg-farm-subsidy-database-shows-largest-producers-reap-billions-despite-climate
Only a small amount of the subsidy money goes to producing fruit and vegetables. Most of that goes to the largest vegetable farms, the guys with 100 acre broccoli fields.
https://agriculturefairnessalliance.org/news/2020-farm-subsidies/
From my perspective we would have a better food system if the poor were provided with subsidies and the farmers made their money selling their crops, whether they are in the market or The Market.
On the point about underpricing, realistically you can set your price as high as you want. If it is too high, you won’t sell very much. In the real world of small farms, you get one bite at the apple once a year. You miss too many bites and you don’t get another chance.
In the US, subsidies are part of a Cheap Food policy. That hurts everyone.
Isn’t this article mostly about how it is very difficult to make a living from small scale farming? Otherwise why are we even commenting? A lot more people would be farmers if they had the land rather than being unemployed, underemployed or homeless in cities. It is not a matter of people making or not making a living from farming when people don’t even have access to land to begin with. A few square meters in the backyard or balcony will only get you so far as a farmer obviously.
I don’t agree that only the poor should be provided with subsidies/welfare payments. Most poor people should work as smallholders. Either that or a UBI/social dividend for everyone.
Sorry about your loss Chris. I was surprised to hear you were only charging £1 per year for your allotments. I pay £110 per year for mine which I think is about the normal going rate. I could buy the apples, strawberries, raspberries etc far more cheaply and easily at Tesco, but that’s not the point. The point of growing food on an allotment, for me, is to learn how to grow food on an allotment, and what works and what doesn’t. You can only learn this from books to a very limited extent: to really appreciate it you have to get your hands dirty and actually do it.
Sorry to hear about your mother. Take a well deserved one month break from writing, bloggin and twittring!
I concur with what you write Chris and have made the same conclusions. And my experiences are very much the same as yours. For a while “organic” was a possibility for small producers, but ultimately the forces of competition work on organic farms as well. My previous farm (a community), which I left 2008 for personal reasons (leaving my then life companion) has made the journey from self-sufficiency (1977-1983 roughly) to arable horticulture (at the most 7 hectares) 1983-2010 and last ten years (after I left it) has moved back to more “local” and the final years there is food sharing schemes etc (and a young immigrant has picked up the commercial crops). When we bought this farm 2014, I never had the illusion or wish to “live” from farming as I wanted to be free to do what I like without the pressures of the market. Last years we have increasingly given away food, but we still sell vegetables and fruits for some 5-6,000 dollars on two Reko-rings, to a few local restaurants/shops and the 4-5 heads of cattle we slaughter every year we sell in 10-14 kg boxes. This is of course possible because we have almost no loans on the place and both I and my wife have external incomes (she as journalist, me as consultant and together as writers).
Decommodification of bigger parts of our lives is essential, which i also why I am very skeptical to a certain brand of market naivism common seen in agrarian populism (if just the market was free enough we would all do fine….If the market was free I could compete with the corporations….etc).
“We need to break away from the idea, that there is something like a fair and free market. Some believe that markets where independent farmers can sell their stuff to consumers represent an ideal; that it is by the interference by governments or big corporations that free markets become corrupt. But free markets are never fair, powers are never equal, capital will be accumulated by some and not by others. The forces of competition are by themselves as much a problem as government rules and big corporations´ monopolist tendencies. ” https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/towards-landscape-diet-and-communal
Hi Chris,
Sorry to hear about your mother. I think she would have been very proud of what you have managed to achieve.
Your account (and then a seconder from Gunnar) does drive home a strong point to me about the viability of vegetable growing and selling. My wife and I expanded our 5 year permaculture journey by purchasing some land in mid 2022 in Australia. We have also been fortunate to purchase the lease of a small shop with very cheap rent in the nearby town that my wife has tranformed int o selling specialised local foods, handmade goods and organic produce (with tourists passing through providing a lot of the revenue from gifts)
This has enabled me to see the perspective of a customer (wants good organic food at reasonable price), a wholesale buyer (there are hardly any growers and those we find can’t afford to sell it to us too cheap) and of a retailer (if we want people to buy the fruit and vegetables we have to make our margins tiny).
In short, the lay of the land is exactly as you describe. I am still working 4 days a week (though remotely now thanks to internet and changes from covid) in my “city” job.
To continue our mission our ideas in the short-term are:
– Continue to dedicate a wall of the small shop to stocking in-season vegetables in small amounts when we can get it
– Line up Community Supported Agriculture subscription packs with keen customers and growers that we have found (we will make no money but instead be a hub for food collection
– Make a small amount of money by selling our own chicken eggs and whatever excess produce we can grow.
– Continue offering camping opportunities with HipCamp on our farm.
– Join advocate organisations (Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance)
Interestingly we have met a few couples who are sort-of on the same journey as us and specialize in other goods (we stock some of their products) who want to be part of the subscription packs etc. This got me thinking that perhaps its better to focus on buying and selling with those like minded people in a “part time” fashion so as to create and keep the capability for being a small-farm producer but accept that the revenue will be small but be relieved that I don’t need to be insanely productive like Jean Martin Fortier
It also seems to me that my wife and I are fast having to become spokespeople for the movement, explaining why wholefoods are better for people and why it is safe to eat a chicken’s egg that has a blue shell (the amount of people from the city who stop by and get weirded out by seeing an Araucana egg is very surprising). Perhaps this is not surprising after all.
This is one of the things I do like about growing my own.
Even accounting for the rather low prices for which organic or agro-ecological or whatever food is available to purchase, if I tried to buy all the food I grow and forage, applying the sort of wages for my own work that are paid to farm workers in the UK, I probably couldn’t do it.
I think next year’s spreadsheet is going to include prices (basically, what I would pay for organic equivalents at the supermarket — knowing that such a figure likely includes a serious underpayment somewhere in the supply chain). I certainly never bought, in a single year, the weight of strawberries we ate this June.
I do not grow all our food, nor am I trying to, but what I do grow means that even while my spouse has been unemployed and we were trying to reduce expenditure, we were able to continue to afford things like the high-welfare organic pastured meat subscription box. It strikes me that the more of their basic needs a household can provide directly, the less reliant they are on markets (whether local, or the very financialised global ones).
We have rent to pay, so selling some of our labour is still very much necessary, and I expect this situation to continue for at least the rest of my life. But… if I’m going to commodify some of my labour anyway, then I may as well do it at a “city job” which pays more than agricultural labour would. I feel no real vocation toward supplying other people with vegetables and I even have some aversion toward selling the produce; my own experience as a freelance musician tells me that I don’t enjoy such commodification.
Diesel , when not if there is shortages small farmers will have a chance of making a living , thirty years ago there were ” truck farms ” growing for local markets all over West TX then came wall Mart , who wanted large delivery contracts , they imported vegetables from California , Californian farmers grew very large to full those contracts , using labour from Mexico now veg comes from Monterey Mexico with up to a thousand trucks a day .
Fuel prices and shortages will stop this market , and open the way for truck farms again . Subsidies prop up a crap business model that looses money without them and takes money from something that is profitable to something which is not ( taxing the profits of gas and coal power stations to subsidize wind ) when fossil energy plants close because of high priced fuel so will subsidised wind farms as their business plan revolves on subsidies , catch 22 ,
Ag subsidies prop up a plethora of companies , no one no matter how big they are can afford to pay unsubsidized prices of tractors , ( $ 150000 + ) subsidies put a finger on the scale against small farmers .
I am sorry you lost your mother , it’s not a easy thing to come to terms with , I lost mine over twenty years ago but she still enters my thoughts every now and again .
RIP
.
Well that was a long post, but glad you gave us the backgrounder. Take time this winter to reflect and rest.
Another key to success as a small market gardener is proximity to populations with sufficient discretionary income (let’s face it, till the commodity food system collapses and the true cost of food becomes evident, small local growers will have to pursue customers willing to pay a premium for the added perceived value).
To expand, there is not a well developed logistical infrastructure for local veg growers. Farmer’s markets are not widespread or full season enough to connect all who might otherwise make that choice.
The economics of growing food- I’ve said it before, but even conventional farmers mostly can’t make it strictly on farming alone. One “feature” of the capitalist system is a drive toward cheap food. Artificially cheap, with externalities not accounted for.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/september/off-farm-income-a-major-component-of-total-income-for-most-farm-households-in-2019/
I see agro-tourism in my neck of the woods as well.
Hi Chris – good to read more about the journey you’ve been on. I’ve been re-reading David Fleming and he’s very good on slack Vs taut economies and how the former will lose out to the latter in the absence of some sort of protection. Derrick Jensen used to say something similar – that a culture prepared to cut down all its trees to build a navy in order to obtain resources from beyond its borders would overpower a culture that wasn’t. I guess that’s Nate Hagen’s super-organism idea.
I think the super-organism probably isn’t going to be slain but will die when it runs out of food (diesel). Hanging on in place until that time is itself an achievement. And I’d like to thank you for providing a forum for us all to read, exchange ideas, think, discuss (create hot air) while we wait.
Sorry that last bit sounded flippant and it really wasn’t meant to be – anything anyone can do to move themselves or others toward some independence from the collapsing systems in which we’re all embedded is a good thing – that those discussions remain so good natured and respectful is pretty remarkable given the nature of most online conversations
@Bruce
“And I’d like to thank you for providing a forum for us all to read, exchange ideas, think, discuss (create hot air) while we wait.”
I concur with all that.
Yes, I feel like I am “waiting”.
Getting on with life , trying to learn some new tricks in the meantime.
Making a go of a smallholding, in this modern age must be difficult. There are so many other ways of making an easier living.
But, these things are going to change. I’m not sure what will be left to spend any surplus income on, once diesel is in short supply.
What’s left of ” surplus income” is dropping all the time , looking at U.S. figures it takes three incomes for those on the lowest level to have any ” surplus income ” that’s a two parent family working three jobs to get by , 15% of U.S. Kids are now missing meals , take the top 1% of earners out of the U.S. and the economy looks abysmal , the rest of the West seems to be in the same boat .
As a side my Tehano friends are collecting money to assist ” immigrants” to return ,they have been asked for money to help , America is Loosing it’s golden appeal , it’s seen as a place of needles ,shit and homelessness .
The UK economy is similar – if you strip out London then the average household income looks much worse and is declining in real terms (that’s not to say there isn’t massive inequality in London). I suspect that’s a trend that’s going to continue and accelerate – assuming energy production has peaked and I don’t see how money can be printed in the way it was in 2009 in order to pretend this isn’t happening.
Strangely it seems peasant agriculture, small scale artisan production (of anything not just food) seems particularly vulnerable in the short term to a worsening economic situation even while it seems like a long term solution to the ills our economic systems have created. The small scale gets out competed on price by the large and so relies on sufficient people having enough spare income to choose to pay more the things they need – there are less of those people now. I’m sure at some point that will invert – probably when energy scarcity drives the cost of transport and processing up but surviving until then will, I suspect, be hard for many small scale producers.
Yep , corporate farming can write losses against taxes paid in profitable parts of their business , small farmers don’t have that luxury .
If you strip out the rich from London then things are pretty bad here too; and rural poverty in the South East is among the worst in the country.
Self-provisioning has actually lowered my grocery bills while letting me pay more for the things I can’t produce (high-welfare meat and dairy), but only because I have the luxury of not paying myself for my time.
Chris,
Sorry to hear about your mother
John
There’s a season for everything… Condolences, Chris and family. May the winter bring solace.
Something of a tangent, here: To any gardeners, especially flower farmers out there, I’ve just stumbled across this and thought it would make a useful Christmas gift – it’s an ebook about Clematis varieties, written by a Ukrainian woman in Kharkiv, who also sells seeds.
https://lindengrovegardens.tilda.ws/clematis#buy
Condolences Chris.
A time of reflection.
@ Kathryn
Exactly my point – self provisioning strategies are for many a luxury they can’t afford. A family working two or three jobs to make ends meet are unlikely to have the energy to take on an allotment and even if they did it would only be worthwhile if the return exceeded the hourly rate they could make elsewhere, which as you say is unlikely – and yet these are the people most in need of a way to free themselves from the existing economic systems which are crushing them.
Many years ago I worked for a little while on a bio-dynamic small holding – I really liked what they were doing even if I wasn’t 100% signed up to the whole bio-dynamic thing. It did allow them to sell their produce locally at a significant premium – more than simply the premium for ‘organic’ stuff. They required customers with significant disposable income, people who were successful in an economic system with values diametrically opposed to those espoused by the bio-dynamic movement. They paid me in part in produce – the value of that produce had a premium meaning the cash part of my payment was less. But I wasn’t living on the holding and was paying rent, running a car to get to work etc and it simply wasn’t viable for me to work on that basis. For the holding it wasn’t viable to pay me all in cash.
I’ve spent years trying to see a way through these contradictions – as someone mentioned many teach as a way to generate sufficient income to make their enterprise viable – but again that’s dependent on a pool of people with sufficient disposable income making it vulnerable to wider economic trends.
Chris mentioned that because he lives on his holding and it supplies much of his basic needs he’s able to survive with a much lower cash income. I guess that was once the role that ‘the commons’ played – allowing a wider range of people to furnish basic needs without recourse to ‘The Market’ – enclosure being promoted by those who benefit from and have power within said Market. I recently read ‘Cloud Money’ by Brett Scott which describes the creation of a cashless economy as another enclosure – once you start looking you see enclosures everywhere and they constantly work to limit the available options within a given sphere of life.
Greg R wrote “…we would have a better food system if the poor were provided with subsidies and the farmers made their money selling their crops…”
I wonder… Considering an extreme case, what if food prices (at the household level) were doubled, with all the resulting increase of food revenues somehow going to the farmers who produced the food ingredients. The UK government statistics indicate that the resulting average increase in daily food spending, per person (with no reduction in amount of food consumed) would be less than £4 per day (£3.70), which happens to be one pound less than the average UK price for a pint of draught lager.
Substantiation:
Looking at how much is spent on food in the UK, the latest government data for the average household weekly expenditure on ‘food and non-alcoholic drinks’ is £62.20 per week. Dividing by 2.4 which is the average household size in the UK, and dividing by 7 days in a week, results in less than £4 per day per person (£3.70).
At the same consumption levels, a doubling of the prices of all ‘food and non-alcoholic drinks’ would thus result in £3.70 of additional daily spending, per person, on average.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/expenditure/bulletins/familyspendingintheuk/april2021tomarch2022
A pint of draught lager costs about £4.70 in the UK, on average.
Ave price – Draught lager, per pint = 467 pence (Oct 2023)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/czms/mm23
Families and households in the UK – Office for National Statistics
“The average household size in the UK is 2.4 …”
Sorry about the business closure.
I’m semi-retired and not trying to run a business, only trying to be more self-sufficient in food. A few crops seem to produce enough food to vaguely justify the labour input, were I to try to value this work at ‘market rates’. I don’t bother, though. They are:
Apples
Pears
Hazelnuts
Walnuts
Field beans
Meanwhile, a few months ago I read the 2015 book by Larry Korn about Manasobu Fukuoka and then I read Fukuoka’s earlier book. His basic methods were no-till, organic, hand labour only, a bit as in ‘Farmers of 40 Centuries’.
His land holding was small, a few hectares. The income quoted for him and normal farmers in southern Japan – this was decades ago, as Fukuoka lived from 1913 to 2008 – was far above £5,000 per year. He was producing mostly rice (growing season May-Oct), some wheat or other winter grain (Oct-May) and fruit.
It seems a topsy-turvy world. In one ‘developed’ country, years ago, an organic farmer could seemingly make quite a high income from no-till farming and could compete with ‘orthodox’ farmers. In another country ~40 years later, an organic farmer can’t even make a low income.
Condolences on the loss of your mother, Chris. A hard end to what was an already challenging year. I hope you get the rest and restoration you need, and find energy and enthusiasm for new ventures next year.
With regard to your new arrangements, you and the new market gardeners on your land might find it inspiring to read about a similar venture in NZ, which has worked very well, with the first couple setting up the farm and the ‘succession’ couple developing a successful vege growing operation there, in addition to the nut orchards and livestock. Read all about it at https://www.pakarakafarm.co.nz/about/
They also do education, and writing, and… so I don’t know if it is possible to make a ‘decent’ living as a small, sustainable grower in NZ any more than it is in the UK. It was once, and it will be again – but I’m not sure about the time frame!
Sorry, Chris!
For what it’s worth, you are an inspiration, both as a farmer and a writer. This history of your fifteen-year market garden experiment is replete with tools and tricks that can be modified and copied wherever people can get to the land. (And yes, I agree that we do need a good deal of land redistribution — or just un-distribution — going forward to make our food systems work for us.)
After this necessary time of grieving and recharge, we all hope to hear more from your unique voice and instructive practical experience.
As to the impugning men… haters gonna hate… my bet is they’re insanely jealous.
This post resonated with me, Chris. There just aren’t enough market gardeners talking about this. I’ve struggled over the past 5 years to figure out a business model that works for my context, and I have yet to find it. Years ago I made a prediction: the price of organic food would equal or be lower in price as the cost of conventional continued to climb because of rising costs of inputs. What I hadn’t factored in were the unexpected rising costs of living that all small farmers would have to factor into pricing as their mortgages, taxes, and all other expenses go up. But still, I kept my priced below conventional. It didn’t matter, this year I saw the biggest drop in sales. My theory is that people, when left with a decision of buying food on a lower budget are not even contemplating organic veg, assuming it will be still more expensive than conventional. I think in some cases they might be skipping veg all together in favour of ultra processed foods.
Next year I will drop veg for sale all together, and I’ll sell strawberries just to keep the lights on. I will grow veg for the family as I still love go grow, and keep my family healthy. Even as I write this stories of salmonella in fruit and oatmeal bars are in the news, and the experts don’t know how it happened … what more do people need to find reason to buy from small farmers? It’s a mystery to me…
Chris, thank you for your truly inspirational work, you and your wife have been, and continue to be, courageous and creative – it is such a great journey to learn from, thank you both. I feel like the future holds even more promise. I hope you find happiness in your grief, and restoration. Much love, really, for your kind intelligence, your dry cider humour and your willingness to get dirty! You are the future my friend!
Chris, so sorry to hear about your mom. My best wishes to you and your family at this time.
I have been thinking about this post for a few days now and I just want to say: I have not read any of these rumors and yet I still find it fascinating to read about your farm ventures and I guess what we might call its tribulations.
I know many who are attempting to steward land are dealing with similar obstacles. Though there are plenty of books written about small success stories, it is rare to see such reflection and intentionality as you have put forth here — especially when a venture might not pan out as we hoped.
I would offer that perhaps these stories are part of the larger narrative that we are already living in the supersedure state (as you have called it). I think it’s also — if we hope to pass through supersedure to become a thriving species in some generations — probably quite important to tell the stories of the near misses just as much as the big hits. For many of us, all of it is aspirational (just the drone shot of your farm was quite impressive).
Hopefully that makes sense. Hope you take this time to grieve, reflect, recharge. And happy holidays!
Thanks for the comments, and for the condolences regarding my mother. I’ll respond briefly to a few of the points some of you have raised in the comment box beneath this one, and then will probably be silent until about the end of January when I hope the decks will have cleared.
Before getting to the comments, in other news George Monbiot wrote this piece – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/14/livestock-farming-soy-soyboy – in the Guardian, where he linked to the ‘Cruel fantasises…’ piece he published about me with the words:
… “agrarian localists” pushing impossible dreams of feeding 21st-century populations with medieval production systems …
I have to confess I got riled enough that The Guardian platformed this silliness to complain to its readers’ editor and ask for a reply – but no dice. Ah well, even if Saying NO… gets the cold shoulder treatment I’m still glad I wrote it and put it out into the world so that at least there’s a consultable alternative to Monbiot’s distortions.
Meanwhile, academic socialist Matt Huber has been describing my book A Small Farm Future as an example of ‘nihilist doomerism’, while confessing he hasn’t read it, and Alex Trembath has been inviting critics of ecomodernism to distance themselves from me, while somehow managing to praise my analysis for its honesty in the process. You know it’s a bad week when your kindest critic works for the Breakthrough Institute!
Maybe I’m doing something right if such folks are feeling the need to dismiss me, but it does take a toll. It’s a given that people are going to ridicule agrarian localism until the grocery shelves are empty, so it’s probably best if I just try to focus on making a positive case. But I might try to write one more piece about where modernism in general and the modern left in particular has gone wrong, just to clarify things for myself. Thanks in the meantime for the many kind words of encouragement here.
From reading the linked piece from George Monbiot, it seems to me that he is a bit spooked. He is swinging “punches” at everyone, not just you Chris.
Looks like he is finding the debate as draining as you are Chris.
He links to you in passing but his main focus, in the article, is “The Meat Lobby”. In which he does have a point. Industrial meat production is a problem.
Moving on to a few points of substance:
Land value taxes: I agree with Kathryn that where land value taxes are levied people will try to game the system and mask ground rent as ordinary rent. The best way to prevent this is to ensure that property is widely distributed … which is where there’s a potential circularity in policy terms. The wider political point I’d make around gaming the system is a civic republican one – yes, people will try to do that, because ordinary people aren’t wholly good (as imagined in Marxist narratives about the working class). But nor are they wholly self-interested (as imagined in the narratives of market liberalism). We need to build politics more around these shades of grey.
Farm subsidies: to Richard’s point, well yes I can see a case for small agroecological farm subsidies (which is what some European countries have done with a portion of their CAP payments … but not the UK). If we take government subsidies as given, that’s one I’d support. My misgivings about it are:
(1) Subsidies tend to maintain the status quo, while meddling at a proximal level with some of its bad consequences … but maybe there are more radical underlying ways of dealing with the bad consequences (e.g. anti-poverty measures, wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, carbon taxes, nitrogen taxes, trade tariffs etc.)
(2) The subsidy suggestion would involve considerable trust that governments would honour them long-term, and considerable trust in government/the state full stop. I lack that trust, particularly as we face the challenging future ahead. So I would rather build local politics than centralized state reliance, along the lines suggested by Steve. In centralized state situations, as Greg suggests, subsidies quickly get coopted by the big players.
(3) While I don’t celebrate the parlous economics of the existing small farm, generally I think we need to reduce flows of capital and decommodify – pretty much along the lines of the small-scale household farming you mention. Government subsidies don’t seem to me to be a good way of doing this. But I think we agree on the desired direction of travel, so the key point of contention is the economic & political means to the end…
(4) …on which note, I’m not quite sure what your model for natural resource managers working in the field entails. I prefer models of farmer or householder led extension, with expert support.
Hospitality: I agree with Kathryn about the aspects of the hospitality industry that do prompt opposition – the Air B&B owner who pushes rents up may be that rare case where the private landlord of the long-term let isn’t regarded as the lowest of the low. Innkeepers and campsite owners get an easier time of it, probably rightly. But the key point is effectively as Kathryn says – where land is readily available, landlordism, like innkeeping, may even be a positive service, not an economic rent suck.
Food markets: to Gunnar’s point about markets (thanks for your interesting wider narrative, Gunnar!) I’d say something similar. I sort of agree with the agrarian populist point that if markets more closely resembled the ‘perfect’ markets of economic theory than exercises in monopoly rent, then small local farmers would be in a better position. However, I agree with Gunnar that this isn’t something that’s just going to happen without ongoing political intervention.
Being a spokesperson: thanks for your interesting account Greg S (as opposed to Greg R – thanks also Greg R, among other things for your wise words about when a failure isn’t a failure). I particularly liked your point about the need to become a spokesperson for the movement, wherein I believe lies a powerful truth … just don’t try to speak it in The Guardian! I think where this might go instead is towards a kind of smallholder class consciousness, which I want to do everything in my power to amplify…
Small farms & commons: agree with Bruce about commons as a way of decommodifying and allowing people to thrive outside the market … which is the way small farms can survive the pressure he describes. But that requires a politics of the commons or a benefactor … another potential circularity.
Solidarity box: …on which note, one thing we did at Vallis Veg (an innovation of some of the graduates of our programme) is establish a ‘solidarity box’, in which better off customers paid more for their box to subsidise access to the scheme for less well off ones. There are many aspects of it that bear further discussion, but I think there’s something to be said for the basic idea.
Returns to market gardening: regarding Neil’s comment, I should probably clarify that there are many ways you can take more than £5k a year out of a market gardening business. Our returns reflect a particular set of recent choices concerning labour. However, I’d suggest there are few ways you could expect to take more than £19k per full-time worker out of a local agroecological market garden (roughly around the minimum wage level), still less the £32k national average income.
Thanks: thanks also for the many other comments and suggestions. Appreciated. And nice to see you here Eliza. Very much enjoy your writing too!
Speaking of politics….
I’ve essentially spent my entire adult life trying to understand why and how we became an ecocidal culturture and civilization — what the fundamental basis of drivers is. And I think I finally arrived at a very strongly arguable argument to explain just this — at least at the core, deep root level.
What we call Western Civilization has always had what is often called “substance ontology” at its very root tips, its deepest roots. It’s not that the roughly opposite ontology (relational ontology) hasn’t been with us for millennia. It has. But it has been mostly a sort of underground tradition, mostly hidden to “the mainstream”. And, besides, hardly anyone was concerned with ontology, or even epistemology or cosmology, in the philosophical senses. But these are the root drivers how how we orient ourselves in this world, so they’re damned important — and you can be sure that they are fundamental to politics.
Our culture, often called simply “modernity,” has been shaped profoundly by its embrace and endorsement of substance ontology over relational ontology. But it’s not just a strictly conceptual, theoretical and ‘cognitive’ affair (in a traditional and restricted sense of ‘cognition’). It’s actually, and even more so, how we feel, perceive and orient to our world well below the thinking, theoretical, conceptual level of being. Ultimately, with regard to categories like feeling, perceiving and experiencing, our culture is caught up in the perception of self as a standalone entity, purely internal to itself. And our politics utterly reflects this sense of self as an isolated, separate entity — because that’s what most of us feel ourselves to be. Be being the operative word in ontology.
But it’s not true! We are actually not isolated and alone in reality, but only in habits of mind and perception — and thus of material and non-material culture. That’s the good news, and I’ve started what will likely be a long series of short articles on this, which will eventually be a book, if I live long enough to write the book.
So far, Resilience.org has republished all of my articles (essays?) in this series so far, so I suspect they will publish all of them. They’re pretty rough, rugged, human, imperfect. I am proud of them. LOL. Perfection, like imperfection, is a curious kind of illusion.
I agree with your points, Chris. However, I think because farmers are so locked in and have been made so dependent on pesticides, fertilisers and all the rest for the last 70 years, I just don’t see any other option other than direct monetary payments to steer things in the right direction again. Even Charles Eisenstein says we should be paying farmers money to implement agroecology. In addition people who have been living in cities their entire lives will likely require some degree of support at least initially aided by natural resource managers who can provide help and guidance as to how to best recycle humanure, store rainwater or plant fruit trees, for example. And if farm payments are going to be disbursed there obviously need to be some checks as to how these measures such as livestock integration are actually being implemented in the field. Overall I think there has to be a lot more to life than thoughts of how to “make a living”. I doubt farmers will ever farm well without knowing where the money is going to come from during a drought, flood or other disaster.
culturture ,,, LOL. I meant to say culture, of course! My fingers got ahead of me.
Chris wrote “The subsidy suggestion would involve considerable trust that governments would honour them long-term, and considerable trust in government/the state full stop.”
That reminds me of something I’ve read about the history of smallholdings in the UK. In the early 19th century, some smallholder communities (called “farm colonies”, meant to be models “for co-operation rather than competition”) were being started, with both private and government funding. However, continuation of government support depended on who won the next election.
“Farm colonies were also established by East London Poor Law Guardians in Essex under the leadership of George Lansbury [who later became the leader of the Labour Party] and with financial support from a wealthy American, [Joseph Fels]. Land for further colonies was bought, including the 1300-acre estate at Hollesley Bay in Suffolk which had been an agricultural college for the sons of gentlemen. By the end of 1905, 500 unemployed Londoners were being trained for a new life and the colony was to be a model for co-operation rather than competition. However, with a change of government in 1906, the status of the colony changed to being little more than an overflow workhouse.”
from “Smallholdings in Norfolk, 1890-1950: A Social and Farming Experiment”
by Susanna Wade Martins
The Agricultural History Review, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2006), pp. 304-330 (27 pages)
According to Wikipedia, “Lansbury added to his public duties when, in 1903, he was elected to Poplar Borough Council. In the summer of that year he met Joseph Fels, a rich American soap manufacturer with a penchant for social projects. Lansbury persuaded Fels, in 1904, to purchase a 100-acre farm at Laindon, in Essex, which was converted into a labour colony that provided regular work for Poplar’s unemployed and destitute. Fels also agreed to finance a much larger colony at Hollesley Bay in Suffolk, to be operated as a government scheme under the Local Government Board. Both projects were initially successful, but were undermined after the election of a Liberal government in 1906.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lansbury
By the way, that Wikipedia article has some interesting details about George Lansbury’s life. He was the son of a railway worker, and lived in the East End of London for most of his life. He worked at various manual jobs before emigrating to Australia in 1884 (at age 25) with his wife and three children. He found that the immigrants had been misled about the employment prospects in Australia, and after experiencing extreme squalor, he and his family moved back to England in 1885. With a job at a local sawmill, he became politically involved “in his spare time”. His concerns included reforming the workhouses, education for the poor, and women’s suffrage.
Correction: early 20th century (not 19th century).
Chris wrote “The subsidy suggestion would involve considerable trust that governments would honour them long-term, and considerable trust in government/the state full stop.”
That presupposes that there is anything left to tax to pay subsidies , looking at the USA the Intrest on government debt is 1 trillion dollars a year with a national debt of $ 32 trillion , per person that is $100,000 , any chance of the average is citizen earning that ? The can has bounced off the wall of the future and landed back at their feet .
Western economies are in a death spiral .
Best wishes for the new year after a year of significant changes in your life. And please keep doing your good work. I know I am among many who appreciate it very much.
Here’s the kind of countdown to the new year I’m sure people visiting this site will really look forward to:
https://orfc.org.uk/session/the-role-of-agroecological-farming-in-the-transition-to-net-zero/
Happy New Year!
Some 2023 updates regarding the manufacturing of bacterial protein powder for human consumption:
1. For some reason, big investors aren’t lining up to fund a factory which relies on growing crops that are processed into sugars to feed bacteria which is then processed to make bacterial protein powder for use in food (with high capital expenditures required for all the facilities, and significant energy inputs required for all that processing).
“Superbrewed Food, a high-profile biomass fermentation startup, has postponed raising capital to retrofit an ethanol plant in Minnesota… Animal-free dairy company Remilk just made a similar decision… There is a dearth of fermentation capacity for startups looking to get to commercial scale, but investors are reluctant to provide the capital—which can cost up to $150 million for a greenfield precision fermentation site…”
https://agfundernews.com/biomass-fermentation-startup-superbrewed-food-to-enter-market-this-year
(continued…)
2. A former manager from Superbrewed Food (a company mentioned above) is now the founder and CEO of a disruptive food-tech startup which bucks the trend of growing crops to feed to protein-producing organisms (whether bacteria or fungi or cows), and instead focuses on growing black-eyed peas for human consumption.
“Could black-eyed peas be the solution to the food supply crisis? Food-tech innovator Better Pulse presents a nutritious plant-based protein that grows in hot climates and could supply a world suffering from food shortages.”
“…Having a white color when cooked and a subtle aftertaste profile, Better Pulse’s bean protein is perfect for turning it into dairy milk-alternative products.
“Operating in “stealth mode” in recent months, the company has successfully concluded a proof-of-concept phase during which it achieved the production of over 70% protein-concentrate-grade protein, seamlessly integrated it into diverse food products, scaled-up pilot production processes and initiated patent applications to bolster its forthcoming intellectual property portfolio.
“It is now signing collaborations with prominent food manufacturers. It also has exclusive rights to black-eyed peas’ genetics that are ready for mechanized harvesting, enabling cost cost-effective, and profitable cultivation beyond Africa, where most black-eyed peas are grown.
“Company founder and CEO Dr. Alon Karpol and colleagues together have more than 40 years of background in the agriculture, food, and protein industries. He previously managed Superbrewd Food Israel…”
https://www.jpost.com/food-recipes/article-758493
(continued…)
3. The highly energy-intensive bacterial protein powder touted by George Monbiot is currently being reviewed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) because it is a “new novel food”.
Much of the submitted “Technical Dossier” (left side of linked page) is available to the public, including “Nutritional information” and “Compositional data”.
https://open.efsa.europa.eu/dossier/NF-2021-1730
I have some concerns about the digestibility of bacterial protein powder, and major concerns about the polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) content of this type of bacteria. I hope that EFSA does a thorough job of addressing these issues, especially the PHB content. I wonder whether a substance like PHB would need to be labelled if the PHB content exceeds a certain percentage (by weight) of the bacterial protein powder, or if the PHB content (and its potential effects on human health) would be hidden? (More about PHB below.)
(continued…)
Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) is a polymer used in biodegradable plastics, and is sometimes used for medical devices implanted in the human body. The presence of a polymer or plastic in the food we eat wouldn’t seem so bad to me if it were totally inert and exited the body in the same form as it went in. However, PHB can breakdown in the gut, and degrades into a pharmacologically active substance with myriad effects on the human body.
“5.1.5. Applications of PHB
…Various disease treatments: The main product of biodegradation of PHB is 4-hydroxyl butyrate (HB), which is active pharmacologically and is a very promising compound for treating different diseases including narcolepsy, alcohol addiction withdrawal syndrome, cationic and chronic schizophrenia, chronic brain syndrome, atypical psychoses, drug addiction withdrawal, circulatory collapse, Parkinson’s disease, cancer, radiation exposure, and various other neuropharmacological diseases [123]. Units of HB are used to effectively treat narcolepsy, which is a sleeping disorder in humans that is detected during early adulthood causing paralysis, unanticipated sleep attacks, and in few cases, temporary muscle tone loss. HB can even act as a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system (CNS) of mammals, because it has a close chemical and structural homology with gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA—a regulator of muscle tone), which functions on the receptors for GABA, thereby reducing narcolepsy and regulating the muscle tone [124].”
Ghosh, Sreejita et al. “Bacterial Biopolymer: Its Role in Pathogenesis to Effective Biomaterials.” Polymers vol. 13,8 1242. 12 Apr. 2021, doi:10.3390/polym13081242
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8069653/
PHB in food, especially food which can be eaten daily and on a long-term basis by the general population, seems like it could have as-yet unknown and potentially undesirable effects on human health, and I hope the EFSA is considering all of this.
Some other related studies will be quoted below.
(continued…)
In this paper, PHB in human food is said to be a potential treatment for various conditions (neurodegenerative, epilepsy, cardiac disorders, diabetes). Their study on rats (with up to 20% PHB content in food) showed that the “biodegradation of PHB, by intestinal microbiota enzymes” resulted in 3-hydroxybutyrate going into the bloodstream and into other tissues (including the brain):
“These data support the potential use of PHB as a nutraceutical compound in functional foods suitable for other extraintestinal conditions (neurodegenerative, epilepsy, cardiac disorders, diabetes), as in this work, 3-hydroxybutyrate has been also quantified in other tissues, such as plasma and brain, after its generation by gut microbiota populations from ingested PHB.”
The paper claims that “The use of PHB is safe for human health [40], [41]”, but those references (40 and 41) don’t seem to justify such a broad conclusion over the long term.
Antitumor bioactivity and gut microbiota modulation of polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) in a rat animal model for colorectal cancer
Fernandez et al., 2022
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141813022001271
“Another concern is the presence of potentially harmful substances within the cells used to produce bacterial proteins. For example, the bacterial strain Cupriavidus necator H16 contains non-nutritive polyhydroxybutyrate [PHB] in their cytoplasm, which could accumulate in the organs upon ingestion, as previously reported for Sprague Dawley mice fed with the bacteria [195].”
from
Hadi, J.; Brightwell, G. Safety of Alternative Proteins: Technological, Environmental and Regulatory Aspects of Cultured Meat, Plant-Based Meat, Insect Protein and Single-Cell Protein. Foods 2021, 10, 1226. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods10061226
https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/10/6/1226
My condolences on your loss Chris, I hope you’re finding the time you need, and that this new year brings you better things.
I’m catching up belatedly, so my apologies if you’ve moved beyond this, but I wanted to leave a comment anyway. This is a fascinating post, I think because of the personal experiences that you describe – it provides a context for the significance of the issues you’ve been giving thought to over the years. That link between theory and practice is crucial, and the best advances in both often occur when that link remains strong and mutually reinforcing.
I say that in part because I’m often painfully aware of cleaving to the theoretical side over the practical – but who knows, perhaps I’ll pluck up the courage to chuck in the academic life , as you did!
And that said, I’m afraid the rest of my comment is very much in the theoretical side of things. So, what follows isn’t meant as a critique of any action you’ve taken, but only of some of the theoretical approach you present in the post, specifically on ‘economic’ and ‘ordinary’ rent.
In my experience, most people who own land today don’t worry about what right they have to do so, or whether even in owning land they yet have continuing obligations to the wider community with respect to that land. The phrase I’ve heard most frequently, spoken, to cast a veil over all of that, and to justify the present dispensation: ‘it’s my land, bought and paid for’.
You seem understandably wary of that attitude, especially when it comes to rent. A landowner shouldn’t be paid anything ‘just because they own the land’. But that only happens, you propose, in the case of ‘economic’ rent, not ‘ordinary’ rent.
I don’t think this distinction is meaningful. Definitions are always tricky, but at a general level I could describe rent as a payment paid by the occupier of land to an absentee owner that acknowledges the owner’s persistent claim to the land. Proceeding from that, there are many different ways of that a rent might be calculated, levied, enforced and justified.
Frequently several different considerations are rolled into one rent payment. You mention what could be called infrastructure maintenance – payment for upkeep that the owner has accepted a continuing responsibility for administering, but that the occupier needs doing, and therefore can be expected to have to pay for. Perhaps that appears in the rent as a regular (and therefore notional) but nevertheless realistic valuation of ongoing maintenance expenses. This is basically a calculable cost associated with labour undertaken on the land that the owner pays and passes onto the occupier.
But timing is everything here – such costs are for labour associated with the land during the time of the occupier’s tenure. What’s left in the rent payment after these costs are accounted for? I suppose we could add a modest ‘salary’ for the owner’s work in administering the infrastructure upkeep – again, this is for labour undertaken during the occupier’s tenure. But once you account for all these contemporary labour costs – basically the cost paid to maintain the land in a condition attractive enough to induce someone to rent it – what’s left is essentially ‘economic rent’. From the owner’s point of view it’s the difference between having or not having a revenue from land that they claim but do not occupy.
I just don’t see a space for any kind of ‘ordinary’ rent here, unless by that term you mean the contemporary infrastructure costs. Beyond these all rent is an acknowledgement that an occupier has to pay because the owner persists in claiming an interest despite their own absence, and by implication won’t let the occupier rest in quiet possession without paying it. The value of that payment is not calculated by reference to the contemporary maintenance costs of the land, but by reference to other considerations that might be many and varied, but at root rely on the ability of the owner to enforce them on the occupier. This is ‘economic rent’. Commonly in our societies today it’s enforcement is protected by the legally defended constitution of private property, and it can be claimed by landowners precisely ‘just because they own land’.
The capacity to charge economic rent relies, as you say, on the limited availability of the resource in question, but in fact that’s fundamental to ascribing a price to anything in a world where nothing is simply limitless. The key factor is not the limited nature of the resource, but the fact that society constitutes it as something that can be owned by one to the exclusion of others. Once that’s established, the owner’s ability to raise rent from it simply depends on their ability to make it attractive to an occupier for some purpose that the occupier might have in mind. As you point out, a rural camping site makes lucrative use of these considerations in a society where so many are looking to escape the urban pressure cooker for a few nights.
As I see it, what you call ‘ordinary rent’ is simply a rebadging of economic rent. You appeal to ’embodied labour’ and present a sort of labour theory of asset pricing, but I don’t think it really stacks up. For a start, if you’re paying for somebody’s labour, the assumption behind that is that you’re reimbursing them for the discrete product of a discrete exercise of their labour, and that once you’ve paid it that product is yours. But that doesn’t work in a situation defined by rent, because even if the occupier lived on the land all their life, they would be paying again and again, year after year, for the same thing (your infrastructure improvements) without coming any closer to possessing it.
Indeed, the way you present embodied labour, it appears to be debt that can never be repaid, extending back to thee people who laid your land drains, and perhaps even further. Calculating it would be very complicated, and it would be owed to many who are now dead – who would that be owed to now? Moreover, does the rent get reduced if the occupier removes some of your infrastructure to replace it with their own? Indeed, dose the contribution of the occupier to maintaining and improving the infrastructure (soil fertility, for example) get taken into account? Now, I’m not really sure that you meant it all this literally, and you end up pointing out that you don’t actually calculate the rent you charge by calculating embodied labour anyway!
So maybe the post is more about finding a better justification for landowners charging rent than ‘just because they own the land’. And I think that’s fine, to an extent. Rent over and above contemporary infrastructure costs is technically ‘economic rent’, but there are more reasons to charge it than the current fashion for milking tenants for all they’re worth. There can be ‘good’ reasons an absentee owner to continue insisting on their interest on the land – for example, ensuring that a functioning agroecological smallholding doesn’t get sucked back into the conventional land market and instead remains a place of education for a small farm future.
From a utopian point of view, perhaps all such reasons are transitional in nature – doing the best in present society to enable a different one in the future. That raises its own problems though, as when are we ever not ‘transitional’, when do we decide we’ve finally made it? Personally I can’t see a place for economic rent charged by a landowner on an occupier in a well organised small farm future, but we’re not there yet, and as you know I have opinions about the nature of landownership more broadly. My instinct would be to explore the notion that absentee landowners be banned, everyone’s an occupier, and that some kind of token or instrumental rent be paid to local land trusts in recognition or fulfilment of wider obligations. But here I am, world-building from the comfort of my armchair again…
Anyway, as I said earlier, this is not intended as criticism of anything you’ve done at Vallis Veg – if anything it’s an encouragement to view your current role as landlord slightly more positively given the reasons you’re doing what you’re doing. I continue to be greatly inspired by your work, both literary and agroecological. Best wishes for 2024!
Thanks for that comment Andrew. It prompts a lot of thoughts, but I’ll just try to make a first blush response. Doubtless I’ll come back to some of these themes and hope to improve my thinking around them.
You seem to have a strong conceptual objection to rent of any kind on the basis of the ongoing rights of an absentee owner, but it’s not clear to me why except inasmuch as those rights may confer enduring power inequalities. To my mind the big questions are about how to prevent enduring power inequalities – abolishing all temporary usage or absentee ownership rights in respect of a good makes less sense to me.
A few questions:
1. I’ve often hired tools from a local company, ranging from bolt croppers to 3-tonne excavators. Sometimes, I’ve ended up buying a tool that initially I made do with hiring. Is it okay for the temporarily absent owner of the tool to rent it to me? Bear in mind that to set up a viable tool hire company would require reserves of capital quite beyond most people’s means, including mine. Is it okay alternatively for me to own a tool? If so, what rights does ownership confer, and how does it differ from housing? Is it more than a matter of market price?
2. Owner-occupier farmers often rent grassland from other owner-occupier farmers for a standardized fee, helping them to manage fluctuating herd sizes and silage harvests. Do you think that would be problematic in a small farm future?
3. The going rate for bare agricultural land around here is maybe £15-20,000 per acre. It’s quite a bit of money, but not beyond a lot of people’s means to raise one way or another. Let’s say that’s the price of economic rent. Suppose you buy or are given two acres of pastureland, and you want to live there and establish a small local market garden. After your £30-40k outlay or write-off you will then need to gain planning permission for a 3-year temporary residence, then build it, then probably get rid of it and build a permanent building-regs compliant residence, create access to water, drainage and electricity, and turn the pasture into productive cropland and associated infrastructures. What would be the cost of that relative to the economic rent, if you paid for your own time at minimum wage?
My feeling is that your comments apply better to urban situations involving a lot of dead embodied labour where rentier houseowners are mostly earning economic rent. But they don’t work so well in the situation on our farm described above. This equation underlies my post, and your comment:
Rent charged = Ordinary rent + Economic rent
Or:
Economic rent = Rent charged – Ordinary Rent
In our case, this latter equation has been returning a negative value, even including the infrastructural improvements made by people with temporary residence rights. People seem to struggle to get their heads around this. However, I accept that we could probably have bought the land and done something more remunerative with it that would have returned a positive value, like turning the whole place into a campsite perhaps. Our access to returns from economic rent in the first place gave us buy-in to the possibility of such further returns. I don’t think we disagree that this isn’t a good basis for distributing property across a society.
I’m not complaining about the negative value. I don’t think it was sustainable in the long run, but it was our choice while it lasted. At the same time, I’m unimpressed with arguments that we were exploiting people who joined our programme, not only because of the negative rent but also among other reasons because they had latitude to increase their own income … or choose to work in a higher-income economic sector.
I think we agree that ultimately you can’t build an economy or a society on quantiative valuation of embodied labour, which was one of the main points of my post (and as I think you hint, ultimately even economic rent is based largely on embodied labour). Though inasmuch as academics (not you!) complain about labour remuneration on my holding, I’m inclined to ask why they’re happy to work in institutions that charge students for their education, rather than paying them for their labour.
If you can’t build a society on quantifying labour value, what do you build it on? My approach is based on an ethic of care associated with agrarian proprietorship, which I believe should be widely available. In this view, the buck stops with you as the proprietor to generate a livelihood and care for your land, within the wider purview of commons, guilds and other more collective local institutions as we’ve discussed here previously.
Conversely, there seems to be a Marxist view that you need to sweep all that away, emphasize wage labour and this will somehow lead to a form of society in which care of people and land will be organized more efficiently and effectively at a largely or entirely collectivized level. I don’t know if you espouse that view, but you seem to emphasize a highly calculative logic in respect of tenant’s or labourer’s rights – no more input should be expected from them than the market price of their time or accommodation. If you abolish private property and collectivize all those relationships, I don’t think you suddenly escape such calculative logic, and this has been a major problem for communist societies. This leads to the unhappy Marxist mashup of Weber and Nietzsche that I mentioned in the OP. I don’t understand how you can generate a less calculative land-based livelihood ethic out of this or even much of a genuinely collectivist one, and I don’t think this has ever been adequately explained within Marxist thought except via a class determinism laced with authoritarian violence. I’m open to the possibility of more collectivized kinds of tenure in principle as a long-term cultural product, but most real-world examples in intensive agrarian societies retain strong elements of de facto household property.
Anyway, getting back to issues of housing and rent, you talk about ‘quiet possession’ unbothered by landlordly demands for rent. Fair enough, but in an agrarian society it’s less about quiet possession than busy livelihood-making where the buck stops with the householder in the face of nature’s demands for their labour. To me, this is an important point that I addressed in the OP with reference to the idea about the world owing me a favour. Maybe the moral of the story is that waged or paid labour can’t be a major route to that. Certainly, I’m glad we’re now pursuing a different model on our holding. But your take does seem quite totalising. I’m not convinced it’s entirely impossible to mix monetized and in-kind transactions within a wider land ethic.
But in relation to quiet possession, suppose you had some tenant’s rights in respect of rent levels and defence against eviction. If you were able to quietly live in a residence for your whole life at some affordable rent without formally owning it, much as an owner-occupier or mortgaged occupier can, what exactly is it that’s objectionable? In practice, politics often drifts towards favouring those with title to land, which is why peasants, smallholders, householders and other relatively small-time people often move might and main to secure title.
But I’m not sure how useful it is to isolate and differentiate ownership and rental as ‘pure’ types of tenure and find them wanting. In practice, every society puts limits around possession, i.e. rights of appropriation. The real issue, it seems to me, is getting those limits right and preventing excessive inequalities of power and wealth. In that respect, a thornier issue than rent around property ownership in a society where liquid capital is inflating land and housing values is property inheritance locking in economic inequality. Private property ownership doesn’t necessarily imply inheritance, which in principle can be dealt with by estate taxes and suchlike. That does, however, require a lot of society-wide political buy-in to the idea of equality and governance for the greater good – again, not the kind of thing I can see easily emerging from a strongly calculative emphasis on renter’s rights or labour rights. In that kind of calculative society, people will want to hand on whatever they’ve managed to accumulate to whoever they please, usually their children. And that’s basically the kind of society we’ve lumbered ourselves with.
Anyway, that’s probably enough for now. Forgive me Andrew if any of the above sounds exasperated. It’s easy for me to get exasperated about this issue, but it’s not directed at you. As ever, I appreciate your thoughtful probing at these questions.
Thanks for the reply Chris, there’s a lot going on there and I’ll attempt a few responses. But first I think it’s worth acknowledging two distinct modes in the discussion – the implications of current assumptions about or attitudes towards rent on the one hand, and a more speculative current about how things might be done differently. My sense is that ‘calulative’ logics apply more to the first (as an aspect of teasing apart existing assumptions) than they need do to the second – I’m very interested in other ways of organising a society and, to nip this in the bud, I wouldn’t advocate for some kind of mass-collectivised society in which all relations were subject to various calculative logics.
‘You seem to have a strong conceptual objection to rent of any kind on the basis of the ongoing rights of an absentee owner … inasmuch as those rights may confer enduring power inequalities.’
It’s not so much an absolute objection (as I tried to suggest at the end of my last comment) so much as a recognition that rent does essentially confer, or rather establish and maintain, an enduring power inequality, beacuse it gives shape to our present system of landownership in which those who possess land have power over those who don’t but want to. I would consider that a simple observation rather than an argument – the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of that would then require addtional argument.
A second observation is that our society recognises two ways of valuing things, sale value and rental value, which are fundamentally different. Valuing something for sale involvces two parties in a momentary transaction that does not create any enduring power inequalities, because both parties recognise that the payment made by one is equal to the extinguishing of all claims by the other on the thing being sold. Rental value is different because even when the renter has paid all costs associated with maintenance and upkeep, the owner is able to insist on a regular payment that never extinguishes their claim on the rented thing.
So to your questions.
1. ‘Is it okay for the temporarily absent owner of [a] tool to rent it to me? … Is it okay alternatively for me to own a tool? If so, what rights does ownership confer, and how does it differ from housing? Is it more than a matter of market price?’
Asking me if it’s ‘okay’ isn’t really the point, unless you want to get into the speculative society-designing mode of discussion, but I don’t think that’s necessary here. The question here is whether lending out the tools enables the owner to charge economic rent, in the sense of more money than it costs them to maintain the tools in good working order. Cleary it does in our current society, and there will be a ‘market’ rental value for such things because a key underlining assumption is that ownership confers a revenue – i.e. that the world owes owners a living.
You ask me to bear in mind the capital invested by the owner of the tool hire company in setting up the business, and I think the implication there is that the rent charged to hire out the tools should be viewed as a way for the owner to recoup what they laid out in the first place. But the owner’s buseiness plan isn’t really the point, especially as it will be shaped by all sorts of personal circumstances that makes talking generally about these things redundant. The more fundamental point to my eyes is that the owner could decide to sell on all the tools and other infrastructure they own to recoup what they laid out and would be left with an additional sum of money gained from economic rent charged when lending out the tools. Again, this is just an observation really: the ownership has given the owner the ability to make money purely out of owning things.
2. ‘…farmers often rent grassland from other … farmers for a standardized fee, helping them to manage fluctuating herd sizes and silage harvests. Do you think that would be problematic in a small farm future?’
Okay, so this question is explicitly in future-directed speculative mode. What you’re identifying here is the need to manage fluctuating herd sizes. I imagine there are many ways we might consider organising that – including setting up an amount of commonly managed pasture serving as a sort of buffer or sponge to soak up occasional excesses. But really my answer would be to reframe the question. Assuming that one farmer wanted to use land owned by another for temporary pasture, should the owner charge economic rent? That is, should the famer simply lend the pasture for a fee that covers infrastructure costs (such as the maintenance of fencing), or should they charge more than that and make additional money from land that, one assumes, they currrently have no use for themselves?
3. I must admit that you lose me a bit here, so I’ve not quoted any part of the question. I’m not sure what you mean by equating ‘economic rent’ to the sale price of the land. The price paid is simply money invested in ownership. You make the case that considerably more money then needs to be invested to turn the land into a viable smallholding, and that that money includes the cost of your own labour in doing so. But what does this have to do with rent? The question I would ask is, if you were to sell the land, would the cost of your improvements be covered by an increase in the sale value of the land? Always tricky, as it depends on so many circumstantial variables, including the current demand for smallholdings. I think you’re suggesting that it wouldn’t.
But are you then suggesting that rental income should make up the shortfall in sale value (is that what you mean by ‘ordinary rent’)? From a logisitical perspective that would be one approach you could take, but there are many unknowables here – e.g. if suddenly the market for rural smallholdings heated up, you might well be able to sell the plot for more than you invested in it, in which case all the rent you charged would be extra money on top of that. My point is that rental income is always ‘extra money’ that comes to the owner purely by virtue of ownership, not as some kind of balance owed to the owner. And the reason that owners can charge economic rent in our society is because the underlying assumption of the system is that the world owes owners a living.
4. (Greg’s question) ‘Andrew invests everything he owns in buying some land. He then lets any and all comers use it rent free. How does this work out?’
The heart of this question is what is meant by ‘rent free’. Assuming that I don’t let ‘any and all comers’ use it but might want to lend some of it to someone temporarily (as in Q2 above), the question I would have to ask is whether I want to generate a revenue from that, which the current system would allow me to do by taking economic rent, or whether I recognise that I can help someone out with their current need, to no detriment of my own requriements of the land at that time, and so just charge them an infrastructure maintenance fee.
Hopefully working through these questions has clarified my approach to these issues to some degree. I think you’re right that, ‘in an agrarian society it’s less about quiet possession than busy livelihood-making where the buck stops with the householder in the face of nature’s demands for their labour’ – given secure possession, this does become the main issue. But the question haunting the OP, I think, is whether that livlihood making should include income from economic rent, which our current dispensation allows landowners to charge – indeed, encourages them to do so – and is maybe framed by your question above about objection to an ‘affordable rent’. My answer in speculative future-directed mode would be ‘no’, because it leverages possession to the loss of those who lack land, and would encourage an ethic of accumulation (i.e. if simple possession confers a revenue, then why not focus on accumulating possessions) which you criticise nicely in your last paragraph – the calculative logics emplyed in a future society would be much reduced it people didn’t have to bother calculating the rental value of land, and could focus on organisational problems instead. And indeed, from an organisational perspective there would be other ways to resolve the managerial issues you raise in some of your questions (especially Qs1 and 2).
But in terms of contemporary problems, as I said at the end of my last comment, I recognise that things aren’t so simple, that we don’t live in a small farm future in which we have a freer hand in organising how we live. And I’ll reiterate that I’m not criticising you for decisions made on the running of your smallholding, I certainly don’t agree with the bloke on Twitter who did. To the extent that people on your programme knew exactly what they were getting into, and could have done something else as you say, they were entering into a consensual agreement with you that allowed both parties to subsist while getting what they wanted out of it – as an explicitly time-limited arranegement it’s perhaps better framed as a sale, in which knowledge and experience are the goods being exchanged for money over the course of a couple of years. I think those considerations are very different from deciding whether to charge economic rent – i.e. whether to gain part of one’s livlihood by leveraging absentee ownership.
But even assuming one does decide to charge economic rent, as I said earlier, there are many ways one might approach that in the current climate. For a start, one does not need to charge the ‘market rate’, which is built on the assumption of a certain level of revenue owed to the owner by virtue of possession. Rent is ultimately an acknowledgment of an absentee owner’s persisting right in the land, and maintaining that right for reasons other than classic rentierism could currently be justified by various broader social considerations directed towards a better future. Clearly, I think the latter could be ‘good’ reasons for charging rent.
In your case, you have chosen to make somthing on your plot which is not likely to enable the classic ambition of a ‘return on investment’ – that’s not why you did it, and it’s not how it’s turned out either, if the ‘negatives’ you mention above are anything to go by. Possession of the land does enable you to charge economic rent, but to the degree that charging it enables you to subsist and to mainain the land in its current agroecological state, insulating it from pressures to turn it into a more ‘remunerative’ investment, and in the absence of a capacity to single-handedly organise a better society, my argument would support that decision as a ‘good’ reason to charge it. Clearly you don’t need my approval (!), but what I was trying to get at before is that you don’t need to erect a theoretical superstructure of ’embodied labour’ to justify it either – when economic rent becomes the foundation for power and influence in society, that’s ‘bad’ in my opinion, but used as a tool to build something better, that’s different.
4. Andrew invests everything he owns in buying some land. He then lets any and all comers use it rent free. How does this work out ?
Chris, I think you are saying something important, but for those of us with dirt stained finger nails, could you restate the last 6 paragraphs in short, declarative sentences ? We are looking at doing something different with our land but how can we meet the needs of our community and neighbors without working ourselves or our land to death ?
Thanks for your reply Andrew, which is clarifying in various ways. I’m going to have to hold off on much further response for a few days or maybe more, but I’d like to come back to it as the issues are important.
For now I’ll just say that the point about the capital outlay of the tool hire company was perhaps sort of about economic rent but more in the sense that it’s not all that easy to generate more local hire companies if demand for tools is high because of capital requirements, just as it’s not easy to generate more local land. But suppose it was moderately easy in both cases. In both cases possession means buying/obtaining the right to use the owned resource to generate a livelihood, part or whole. In that situaation, if I’m charging you rent for living on my land and you don’t like the rent I’m charging or other aspects of my landlordly ways, then you can go and buy your own land or at least perhaps aspire to doing so soon, or find a better landlord. I’m broadly sympathetic to your case for decommodification, but the crux of the issue seems to me to be the monopolistic aspect of landownership and the speculative gain from economic growth it enables, not rent as such. In other words, where you write “rental value is different because even when the renter has paid all costs associated with maintenance and upkeep, the owner is able to insist on a regular payment that never extinguishes their claim on the rented thing”, that wouldn’t be true in a non-monopolistic market, where the owner would basically only be able to cover their costs.
Anyway, I’ll respond in further detail when I can … and Greg, I will try to spell it out more clearly as best I can when I do. Thanks for the discussion.
Thanks Chris. I would probably agree that rent ‘as such’ is not a problem, but I think to focus only on monopolistic situations is too narrow – when one of the key assumptions of a society is that ownership per se should confer a revenue, it’s not just monopolistic situations in which rent becomes dangerous, as all owned resources are limited to some degree by their circumstances and the various reasons for their attractiveness to potential renters.
More broadly I think positing a hypothetical situation in which new land is ‘moderately easy’ to find moves too far from reality, unless you have in mind some expansionary frontier situation, or you propose that current large-scale landowners be disappropriated and their holdings divided into hundreds of thousands of small lots. Even then, though, the demand for land would have to be pretty immediately satisfied, the market not just ‘non-monopolistic’ but essentially a free-for-all, if potential rentiers ‘would basically only be able to cover their costs’ – in which case, of course, why be a rentier in the first place?
Anyway, this has been a fascinaing discussion – thank you. As ever, I look forward to seeing where this goes!
Andrew wrote, “And the reason that owners can charge economic rent in our society is because the underlying assumption of the system is that the world owes owners a living.”
I’d say it’s because of the exclusive rights of ownership, with the owners setting the terms for how their property can or cannot be used by others (within the system’s laws). Owners can decide to use some property (a house, a field, a tool) occasionally and leave it unused for most of the year. Or they can offer to rent the property to other people who might want to use it.
The rental cost which can be charged typically depends on supply and demand, of course. When the supply available to people is externally constrained (e.g., through land zoning laws, planning permission hurdles, corporate ownership), the people pay higher prices for land and property purchases and rentals, which suits the current owners who are disproportionately represented in the halls of power, where “the system” is created and maintained.
As long as the land is marketable (with a real market value), land ownership can be treated as just another investment, an alternative to putting the underlying value (if sold) into the stock market or government bonds or some other investment. As long as land is considered to be an investment, returns on the investment will typically be expected, beyond just covering costs.
How can this commodification of land be avoided in our existing culture, within our existing laws? Land owners can individually keep their land off the market during their lifetimes, and even share the land for others to use rent-free, but after the death of those owners, the heirs can typically sell off the property to the highest bidder. So the land never really escapes commodification, unless those owners made arrangements with a land trust during their lifetimes. (Bequeathing the land to a charity like the UK’s National Trust is not sufficient, as the National Trust has been known to raise funds by selling acres of donated land to housing developers.)
Community land trusts can decommodify housing and hold land (for stewardship in perpetuity) with the investment potential removed from the picture. Beyond urban areas, farmland can potentially be held by community land trusts, which could be set up to allow members to build homes and farm on land they lease from the land trust, and even sell their home structures there later (with resale price limited to avoid speculative gains and keep prices affordable to others), while the land itself is protected.
Trusts require trustees, however, and safeguards need to be built in to the legal framework to avoid trustee problems like those currently being experienced at Simon Fairlie’s community, Monkton Wyld:
https://www.monktonwyldcourtcase.co.uk/timeline/
Nothing really to disagree with here Steve, except I’d push the connection between the ‘exclusive right of ownership’, which you highlight as the reason that owners can charge economic rent, and the fact that , ‘…as long as the land is marketable (with a real market value), land ownership can be treated as just another investment’. The two two elements emerged together historically, and constitute the basis of the underlying ‘system’.
You lay out the problems and possibilities clearly, and Monkton Wyld is a good example of what can happen when land trusts go wrong. Nevertheless, the idea of paying some kind of non-market rent to a land trust for one’s land is a context that would repay exploration, I think (another situation in which rent is not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing?). For many years I’ve been fascinated by Thomas Spence, an early nineteenth-century radical who came up with a ‘plan’ to institute communal property on the basis of the parish (he was against nationalisation and the intrusion of central government). Essentially each parish would be a land trust for all the land within its bounds, farmers would rent their land from it, and the entire population of the parish would constitute the trustees, who received dividends from any surplus after costs had been met. Of course this isn’t something that could simply be implemented now, but I find the broader vision very useful to think with!
The Schumacher Center for a New Economics has a “Community Land Trust Toolkit” which includes information and legal documents related to Indian Line Farm, a CSA farm which became part of a Community Land Trust in the late 1990s. A couple of former farm apprentices took over the farm, buying and repairing and owning the buildings on the site while leasing the land (including the land under the buildings).
Unburdened by land debt, the couple “can continue managing the farm business—building soil fertility, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and marketing—without forcing crop production to pay for a mortgage on the land itself,” and they have been running their successful CSA farm every year since then.
“The lease on the land provides all the security and incentives of ownership including the right to pass on the farm to heirs through transfer of the lease.”
“The resale restrictions call for the leaseholder to keep the current replacement value of improvements on the site, adjusted for deterioration, without also capturing the speculative land value.”
https://centerforneweconomics.org/apply/community-land-trust-program/toolkit-legal-documents/
By the way, Monkton Wyld is as an educational registered charity, not a community land trust, so the trustee problems there are not directly applicable to community land trusts.
I still disagree with Andrew’s claim that “the reason that owners can charge economic rent in our society is because the underlying assumption of the system is that the world owes owners a living.” I think the underlying assumption is instead about property rights, whereby the owners are able to leave property unused, or they can allow others to use it for free, or they can give away the property, or the owners can try to make some income from the property if that’s what they want to do with it (within the limits of the laws).
Thanks for the ongoing discussion. I want to come back to it in more detail in future, but Andrew if you’re still reading I’d be interested in your clarifications on a couple of points.
First, apologies if my initial response was overly defensive or irritable. If we abstract the discussion completely from my own situation & from Messrs H&H, which I think we now have, I can better retain my equanimity.
It seems to me that in your initial comment and to a lesser but still palpable extent in your later ones you’re arguing for a difference in kind between rent and other forms of income. I’m not convinced this distinction exists.
Where I think we agree is that in the case of land there are strong monopolistic possibilities, and there can also be embodied public values from which a landowner might benefit but not contribute to. Hence, although you’re right that my thought experiment about the availability of new land departs far from current reality, I think it’s conceptually important because if you agree with me (you write “I would probably agree that rent ‘as such’ is not a problem”) then your sharp distinction between rent and other forms of income fails, and conversely my distinction between economic rent and ordinary rent stands (on a point of fact, I do actually think that land should be divided up into vast numbers of private smallholdings, but that’s a whole other discussion).
As I see it, tenancy is one kind of property right, while private ownership is another. All property rights are the public conferral of a right of some kind onto a delimited right-holder or right-holders to derive a personal benefit from a thing. In practice, I concede that property rights are often skewed greatly to the benefit of owners and against tenants, but my argument is that this is not conceptually intrinsic to private ownership.
I’m not sure if I fully understand you when you write “it’s not just monopolistic situations in which rent becomes dangerous, as all owned resources are limited to some degree by their circumstances and the various reasons for their attractiveness to potential renters.”
This sounds like you’re arguing it’s dangerous to delimit the right to appropriate a benefit in respect of a thing to any specific person(s) – which seems to me a radically communist/collectivist position. I think it would be unworkable in practice, and it’d require either minute governmental oversight of the appropriators that effectively re-invented private appropriation rights via public decree, or strong collective discipline among the appropriators. But again that’s another discussion. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
I think we agree that people own their own labour. But what about the products of their labour? Do these become immediately social, purely collective goods? And is labour-time itself the only good that attracts a value? In the case of the person (close to my situation but let’s keep it conceptual!) who builds a house and a farm on a ‘bare’ bit of land, where do we draw the boundaries around this? Let’s value the bare land itself at zero and also acknowledge that land is never really bare but always a social product (for example, with old clay field drains) and value that at zero too. If you lease a part of the house or farm you’ve built to me, you seem to imply in your comments that any sum you charge me in excess of the price of your own labour and material costs is (illegitimate) economic rent. I’m not sure I agree. Of course, if there’s a monopoly in land, which there often is, it’s likely the tenant will pay economic rent. But suppose there isn’t (hence your question, what then would be the attraction of being a landlord or a tenant? Well, maybe not much – but, hey, I like you and your farm, and I’d like to stay here for a year or two. The farm isn’t just the house you built or the fields you tilled, it’s an idea you had, an emergent system in the landscape, a project in your life-course). Let’s decommodify it, and agree that no money is going to change hands. Do you see any grounds for me, your tenant, to feel any special responsibilities or obligations towards you, the farm-owner and farm builder? Alternatively, perhaps I’m much younger than you. Times have changed. There seems little likelihood that I’ll have the kind of chance that you once did to build my own farm. I see a bleak future ahead. In these circumstances, perhaps there are grounds for you, my landlord, to feel special responsibilities towards me, your tenant? So perhaps we can’t then find agreement over obligations in respect of each other. We go our separate ways – you return some of your fields to the wild, because you can’t find the labour to work them. And I move on, looking for a better option?
Sorry Chris, I didn’t see this for a few days. I think it’s always a good policy to abstract the discussion from Messrs H&H here, despite their occasional Twitter-based needling!
You’re right to say that I see a difference in kind between rent and other forms of income – from a sort of anthropological point of view, charging a rent price is distinct from charging a sale price, because one transfers ownership and the other doesn’t. Specifically, I think the distinction is very significant in terms of the social relationships the different transactions enable. I’m not sure why the distinction should fail if I agree that rent ‘as such’ is not a problem – I meant simply that the kinds of relationship enabled by rent are not inherently ‘bad’. Nevertheless such relationships always, I think, involve some form of dependency of occupier on renter, which could be problematic depending on the circumstances (and often is in our present society).
I agree that there are ‘strong monopolistic possibilities’ with land, but whereas I think you see these as the source of an owner’s ability to charge ‘economic rent’, I see such rent as chargeable in less monopolistic situations as well. This is because I don’t see a distinction between ‘economic’ and ‘ordinary’ rent as you do. In this I may be following a fairly conservative route as I would largely accept the neoclassical definition of economic rent given by Wikipedia (!): ‘any payment (in the context of a market transaction) to the owner of a factor of production in excess of the cost needed to bring that factor into production’. The magnitude of this payment can be increased by monopolistic situations and by locational factors, ‘from which a landowner might benefit but not contribute to’ as you put it, so we’d agree that far, but for me the payment itself, not just certain increases in its magnitude, is ‘economic rent’.
And the ability of an owner to charge it is entirely down to the form of social organisation that protects their ‘right’ of ownership against the claims of others – it doesn’t emerge as a natural corollary of any other economic attribute. So I’d agree that ownership and tenancy are two different kinds of right conferred publicly in order to delimit the appropriation of benefits, although I would emphasise the place of power and the creation of social hierarchies in the way such public conferral has been engineered in our own society historically.
As far as I’ve worked out any kind of position in the future-directed utopian mode, I do hold to a more communal position than you, in that I place greater emphasis on designing the public organisation in which land is distributed and the rights of occupiers delimited. I don’t see much of a place for private rental agreements, in which absentee owners persist in claiming certain rights in ‘their’ land. But I tend to gravitate towards your arguments and away from statist or totalitarian bureaucratic ones in that I think this would only be effectively workable at local scales, within communities with a decent degree of face-to-face contact. I don’t think ‘strong collective discipline among the appropriators’ is inherently unworkable – and the alternative, in which private property rights continue to be protected at law and enforced on private citizens, would require the persistence of some kind of extra-local legal and disciplinary machinery that would also call into question the workability of a more individualised approach.
‘I think we agree that people own their own labour. But what about the products of their labour? Do these become immediately social, purely collective goods? And is labour-time itself the only good that attracts a value?’
These questions are interesting to me because, in my mind, they don’t really relate to rent. ‘Ownership’ and ‘value’ need to be placed into specific contexts clarify their meanings, and I think here the context is the pricing of sales, not rents. People ‘own’ their labour in the sense that they expect to get paid for undertaking it, the assumption being that labour-time and the price paid for it are in some sense equal and can be exchanged one for the other. The question as to who ‘owns’ the products of labour depends on the ways that production is organised – i.e. whether the means of production, tools, materials, etc, are ascribed to particular ownership or shared. I should add that, despite often showing a lot of interest in various Marxist approaches here, I’m not a great fan of labour theories of value as a kind of essential foundation for understanding economic phenomena. As the above hints, I prefer to focus on the way economic organisation creates and mediates social relationships and hierarchies.
I think that in the two scenarios you offer in the final paragraph, the question I would need to answer is, what’s the point of the owner – why are they still invested in owning the land when, in failing to reach an agreement, the only option left appears to be abandonment? Why not just let it pass to a new occupier, without maintaining an absentee right in it? These questions have different answers depending on the kinds of societies we’re considering. In a utopian discussion I would tend to minimise the right of absentee owners, instead attempting to essentially equate occupation with ownership, but with ‘ownership’ organised and mediated through strong local communal institutions. But in our present society, as I said in earlier posts, I think good answers can be provided to those questions if the owner is essentially attempting to protect the land as an agroecological project from being sucked back into the conventional market.
Thanks for that Andrew. Food for thought which I hope to work through in more detail in due course.
It seems to me our positions are fairly similar. We could probably frame this discussion in terms of collectively-granted appropriation rights without using the words ‘own’ or ‘rent’ and largely agree. In particular, I agree with you that the ability of an owner to charge rent “is entirely down to the form of social organisation that protects their ‘right’ of ownership against the claims of others”. So indeed, everything is politics. Although that does make me doubtful of your idea about the “natural corollary of any other economic attribute” (…‘natural’ and ‘economic’ in what sense?) and the weighting you continue to place on absenteeism as a conceptual limit.
Absenteeism and its relation to economic/ordinary rent admits to considerable gradations – from, say, George Washington claiming rent for wooded hills in Virginia he’d never seen, to the person who builds a house and charges rent to a lodger on a room in it they’re not using at the moment (and certainly can’t while it’s occupied by the lodger).
One reason why somebody may wish to let land (or anything) rather than alienate it completely is because of the ebb and flow of their life projects. Suppose I built a garden, tended it for a few years, and then got drawn into other things, perhaps for reasons beyond my control. I let it to someone for a year or two, with the intention of returning to it, or developing it in a different way longer term. Your ‘use it or lose it’ take puts a lot of onus on me to stick to a schedule imposed by the wider collectivity, and it puts a lot of trust in that wider collectivity to make good decisions in respect of the minutiae of people’s life histories and life decisions. I think there’s a risk of inflexibility, political capture and a different kind of system-gaming within your view. Shades of the notorious bedroom tax, perhaps, which can cut both ways?
You rightly emphasise the way that property ownership buttresses political power at the top, but I think it’s important also to emphasise the way people who are not very powerful politically seek ownership to build their autonomy and livelihood flexibility. For example, there are traditions of inalienable ‘family land’ in various societies (Jamaica springs to my mind), where everybody in a kinship group has access rights in respect of small rural plots, which have been arduously established historically (this of course raises that other bone of contention in respect of highly collectivist left-wing thought – the idea of family, which we’ve also debated. There’s a strong connection between the two, which I hope to explore again in the future). It seems implicit in your view that if the family (or other micro-collectivity) isn’t using this land in ways deemed optimal by the larger collectivity, the correct land use politics would compel them to relinquish their rights in it. I’d take a more pluralist view.
In relation to the ownership/rental thing, here’s another example I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on. If, heaven forbid, you go to Amazon’s Prime Video website, you’ll notice that it offers you the option to ‘rent’ a film – typically for around £3.50 – which usually confers you the right to watch it once within the next 48hrs and to lose access to it thereafter. Or you can ‘buy’ the film for around £7, which confers you the right to watch it whenever you want as many times as you want in perpetuity after your purchase. I guess the logic of your position is that Amazon shouldn’t be renting films, only selling them, but I’d be interested in your thoughts.
Generally, I’m supportive of the idea of inalienable ownership of small plots of land, with defences against monopoly landownership and overly extractive rents. I’m not supportive of political authorities overly micro-managing what people are doing month by month on their plots. However one frames this, I think there are always difficult questions of how to keep access to land moving population-wide in ways that support general wellbeing. But I believe there are historical examples of mixed economies of private ownership, public ownership and commons which have done a reasonable job, and I don’t see a good case for expunging (ordinary) leasing from the picture on a priori conceptual grounds. Although I do agree on the need to keep it – along with higher level political power – in check.
Thanks Chris – in particular for keeping this little discussion going while the main blog moves on. I’ve been finding it really useful to think through this stuff – always a highlight here.
On a broader framing focused on ‘collectively-granted appropriation rights’, I agree – and our positions do tend to move closer at a more conceptual level. Nonetheless, working through differences apparent at a more real-world level has been quite productive.
On the ‘natural corollary of any other economic attribute’, I was referring to the ways in which some arguments for the existence of rent are structured (as with the kind of labour-value theory this all started with) – I wouldn’t make such arguments myself. Rent can’t be explained through such arguments in my view.
On absenteeism, I take your points about the changeability of life projects and flexibility more generally, and I concede that any future collecitve land organisation cannot be too rigid or draconian about occupancy so as to forbid the kinds of life breaks, ebbs and flows you describe. But I think that would be fairly easy to mitigate with a more expansive or flexible understanding of occupation. Previously here we’ve talked around a sort of utopian principle that any landholder with more land than is required for their own general subsistence (or that of the household of which they form a part) should expect to have to relinquish the excess in some way. Keying a notional sense of ‘occupancy’ to subsistence seems sensible to me – absence is only objectionable if the absentee is off somewhere accumulating a landed estate. Perhaps the rural equivalent of a ‘no second home’ policy is what we’re after – and perhaps more acceoptable to you in that it’s more about keeping accumulative behaviour in check.
But back to rent – whatever the reason for the absence, it’s not necessary to fill it with a tenancy. This, I think, is a common contemporary assumption that I framed earlier as ‘the world owes owners a living’. I wonder if it’s lurking in your scenario where a homeowner ‘charges rent to a lodger on a room in it they’re not using at the moment (and certainly can’t while it’s occupied by the lodger)’ – the idea that the lodger is a kind of opportunity cost, that because the owner chose to use the room one way (to house the lodger), the lodger should pay the owner as an acknowledgment of some parallel universe in which the owner devoted the room to some more remunerative activity.
I’ve argued that rent is an acknowledgement of an owner’s persistent claim to an asset during their absence, but it needn’t be the only way of establishing that acknowledgement. All that’s needed is a publically recognised agreement of some kind, it doesn’t need to involve revenue generation. So my utopian position would be to explore the possibilities of other such forms of agreement to mitigate the kinds of milder absences you describe.
On family land, accepting your various caveats on ‘family’, the important point here is secure tenure. Again, I recognise the need for this – it has to be at the heart of a politics of landed subsistence really – but I also think it’s compatible with a more flexible sense of occupancy, as above. Perhaps this is where we tend to agree – something that I prefer to frame as collective organisation, you would frame as a kind of politcal check on accumulation, which has less of the whiff of totalitarianism about it. We may, however, disagree at the highly abstract level of ‘right’ – in the last instance, is the land ultimately vested in the community or the individual? I would go for the former, perhaps you would go for the latter, but perhaps it doesn’t really matter that much, in that any workable politics of land won’t really need to worry about such theoretical niceties, as it will look like it could be derived from either position.
On Amazon video, I think the terrain of the dicussion would shift quite dramatically I think, to commodities and ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, to coin a phrase! My position would start from the point of view that the artists involved should be remunerated for their work, and that Amazon shouldnt make a profit over and above their costs of distribution and reproduction. But we’re in another world now, and though I enjoy the odd film night as a paid up member of the status quo, I imagine we should probably start to talk about the benfits of more immediate forms of local artistic production in a utopian future. Excuse the cop out, but I think I’l leave it at that for now!
Hi Andrew, thanks for that. Apologies I’ve just been caught up with too many other things to respond. Well, I hope to return to this discussion in due course. I agree with you that the property owner shouldn’t expect to be owed a living, although you could say the same about anyone … except inasmuch as in utopian mode one ideally wants to set up politics in such a way that everyone can earn a living. If there is widespread access to land, then that creates a widespread means of earning a livelihood … but the debt one owes then is to oneself. Another way of putting that would be to distinguish between a politics of ownership and a politics of proprietorship. I think the latter is important. I’d be interested in your views.
Read this through to the end. It echoes my experience starting and operating a small scale mixed permaculture farm near Hamilton ON Canada.