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 February 28, 2024 | 38 Comments
The gist of my last two posts is that manufactured microbial food isn’t plausible on energetic grounds as a mass food approach unless there’s a rapid and large expansion of available global energy, and that the more likely future trend is in the opposite direction – towards less energy. Like it or not, I think that means a future of low-energy agrarian localism.
The main reason I try to prepare the ground for agrarian localism in my writing is therefore because I don’t think we have much choice. I fear that the transition to agrarian localism might be troubled and potentially violent. However, I fear the transition to every other possible future might also be troubled and potentially violent, only more so. The quicker we can lean into a small farm future, the less troubled and violent it’s likely to be.
I do think additionally that aspects of life in small farm societies can be congenial and rewarding. That’s an unorthodox view nowadays, albeit largely because of modernist ideologies that have propagandized fiercely against localism and agrarianism and found endless ways of ridiculing people who advocate for them. I don’t think these modernist ideologies are set to last much longer into the future or are useful in the present world-historical moment, so I believe it’s important to contest them and try to build longer-term agrarian cultures that are fit for present times.
A small farm future out of practical necessity, then, but also one evincing positive cultural possibilities. But practical necessity is the critical driver.
Is agrarian localism practically feasible in the present world, though? Here’s a sample of some of the pushbacks I’ve got on this point recently on social media:
Mate you’ve still got to figure out how you feed ~70 million people in the UK with small farms, I’d pipe down
The same writer added:
I just wanna see a simple sum where you figure out how much you produce per acre and scale that to 70mil people doing it. Can you actually feed people and not take over the entire land surface of the UK?
Mixing the practical with the cultural/ideological, another writer said:
Chris Smaje needs to spend some time looking at the low input low output agricultural systems in sub Saharan Africa to understand the realities of the rural economy.
Okay, let’s run with these.
The simple sum of the amount of food that agrarian localism can produce in Britain is … whoa, hold your horses. I’m going to give a number later in this post, but the number needs some context first. Numbers always need some context first.
I’ll kick off by saying that I sense a framing trap here along the lines described by language philosopher George Lakoff, whereby an antagonist traps you into their way of formulating an issue that you don’t share. The context for the ‘pipe down’ comment was my argument with a certain prominent journalist who favours manufactured microbial food, which he believes spells the end of most agriculture. I and others have shown that several of this journalist’s key numbers in support of his arguments are wrong, but as far as I know he hasn’t responded to these critiques. Nobody has shown that the existing high-energy food system in Britain, or higher-energy alternatives to it like manufactured microbial food, will be able to feed Britain’s population long-term. Yet I’m the one who’s supposed to pipe down? It’s reasonable to ask how agrarian localism can feed current and future populations – but only if you ask the same question of the business-as-usual, high-energy industrial agriculturists and the ecomodernists. And on that score, they’re not piping up.
Possibly, the notion that it’s especially difficult to feed people from small, low-energy farms stems from some misconceptions about the existing food system. If you survey many modern arable landscapes with their big fields and giant, high-tech machinery, it’s certainly easy to think that small farms couldn’t match their productivity.
But the reality of contemporary industrial farming is overproduction, and waste (Glenn Davis Stone’s book The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World discusses this in detail). Those fields and machines aren’t designed to meet the needs of local communities for healthy food. They’re designed to provide healthy profits, principally for input manufacturers and food-system middlemen. Generally, they do that by minimizing costs per product, including labour costs (hence the big machines), not by maximizing yields per hectare.
In fact, particularly in low-income countries, research often finds an inverse relationship between farm scale and per hectare food productivity (discussed in my book, A Small Farm Future). Where that’s not the case, the higher yields of the larger farms usually result from higher inputs such as irrigation water, synthetic fertilizer or pesticides – and the non-sustainability of such inputs on climate, energy and biodiversity grounds is no longer in question.
Hence a rule of thumb that might surprise some: per hectare food productivity may vary in either direction with farm scale, but on the whole it can be treated as scale neutral. There’s no special reason to suppose that small farms will produce less food in aggregate by virtue of their size. In fact, there are reasons to suppose they’ll produce more.
Looking at farmland in a country like the UK, it’s easy to assume that small farms are a minor and bygone part of the global food system, but this simply isn’t the case globally. Exactly how much of the world’s food they produce is hotly contested (see for example here, here and here). The paper by Knezevic et al that I just linked suggests that over 50 percent of food worldwide is produced by farms of 10 hectares or less on about 40 percent of global farmland (note the greater per hectare productivity). Even a much-criticized paper by Ricciardi et al suggesting that very small farms contribute a relatively small share of total global food production concurs that such farms are proportionately higher yielding and less wasteful than larger farms. So, to reiterate, there’s no inherent reason to suppose that small farms can’t feed us – even in the UK.
A final bit of context. It’s quite easy to take national statistics on farmland area and on yields of major commodity crops like wheat or maize to compute figures such as the amount of calories or protein these crops produce per hectare. It’s not so easy to compute plausible figures for a population’s potential cultivation efforts across a whole country – farmers, market gardeners, smallholders, allotmenteers, backyard growers and gardening guerillas cultivating verges, embankments and building lots with scores of different nutritious crops, while cleverly integrating livestock into this ecological flow. Bear in mind also that livestock are not just a source of fat or protein – they provide so much more in low-energy small farm systems, including a great deal of farm labour. If you’re going to compute their land costs, you’ll need to do the same for the tractors, agro-chemicals and fuels in the industrial system. In general, I think these unquantified and largely unquantifiable potential margins lead to underestimation in the potential of agrarian localism to feed us.
Anyway, even bearing all that in mind, the question remains – can Britain feed itself with small-scale, agroecological methods? I’ve crunched a few numbers on that in both my books, and so did Simon Fairlie in his excellent 2010 book Meat. The answer is a pretty clear yes.
In the rough and ready exercise I undertook in Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, I calculated that in Britain we could grow just under 40,000 MJ of food energy and just under 340kg of edible protein per hectare per year using organic methods without synthetic fertilizer or pesticides, which would translate to using about 32 percent of Britain’s existing farmland to feed its 67 million population. There are many further complexities I could discuss, but my man wanted a simple figure and there it is. You’re not going to get coffee, bananas or beefburgers on demand from my system, but you can’t always get what you want in life … and that’s not always a bad thing.
Sometimes it surprises people to hear that Britain could feed itself, since that’s not something it’s actually achieved for a couple of centuries. That’s because it’s chosen not to, not because it can’t. The underlying ethos has been that we can buy what we need on global markets. I don’t think that’s a wise long-term bet.
Well, that was easy. Let’s take on a tougher challenge. Can Tokyo – the largest metropolitan area in the world – feed itself with local food? This was the question Jeremy Williams posed in his largely negative review of my book.
The answer is no, right? There isn’t enough space to grow local, agroecological food for Tokyo’s 39 million people within the metropolitan area where they live. And there isn’t the energy to produce manufactured microbial food for them either. That leaves them reliant on importing their food from other places via industrial supply chains.
If those truths lead you to score your card Industrial food chain 1, Local food web 0, I think you’re missing something vitally important. I mean whose food system vision really has a problem here? I’ve been clear in my analysis that present forms of urbanism are an outcome of cheap fossil energy and are unlikely to survive unscathed in the energy squeeze to come. I think the onus is on people who expect to see the Tokyos of this world to keep sailing on their merry way and chowing down on the products of global food commodity supply chains to explain how that’s going to remain feasible.
Now, there are people who want to position me as some kind of uncaring anti-urbanist ghoul on this point – ‘Ha! No food, water or sewerage in Tokyo – die suckers’ or whatever. I don’t think that can reasonably be justified with reference to anything I’ve actually said or written. The fact that we won’t be able to sustain present forms of urbanism is a godawful problem that our civilization has set up for itself. That problem is not, however, lessened by pretending it doesn’t exist or polemicising against those of us who are trying to draw attention to it. We need very urgently to be figuring out what to do about it instead of compounding the problem with hopium about manufactured microbial food, limitless solar electricity or the special ability of industrial supply chains to keep urban grocery shelves stocked.
Let’s briefly go large and ask if agrarian localism can feed the world. Let’s also go for context: this is another framing trap. But first to the question: I don’t know if agrarian localism can feed the world. Partly it’s because, as I’ve already said, I have no methodology to account for every ear of corn, every beet leaf and every other kind of food in all their magnificent variety that could be grown on every street corner, every lot, every roof and every field in cities, towns, villages and countrysides the world over. And partly it’s because I have no methodology to account for the impact of climate change, energy descent, water stress, soil loss and political strife that will affect small-scale farmers along with everyone else in the years to come. But the question is a framing trap because the same – in fact, generally worse – uncertainties apply mutatis mutandis to large-scale, industrial agriculture and every other kind of food production.
Still, as I mentioned above, small-scale farming currently supports more of the world’s population than industrial farming. It’s hard to see that finding reversing in the future. On the contrary, it seems likely to increase. And ultimately a good part of that increase will likely be carried by deurbanization and effective population movement from fiscally rich urban industrial-service economies to agriculturally rich rural agrarian-commercial economies. Seriously, we need to be talking about this and preparing for it, instead of ridiculing it.
Let me turn now to the statement that I need to spend time looking at low-input, low-output agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa to understand the realities of the rural economy.
Well, sub-Saharan Africa is a big place that an awful lot of people call home. It’s not just one thing – ‘the rural economy’. I’ve spent no more than a few days in sub-Saharan Africa myself, but I’ve been influenced by people who’ve spent a lot of time studying parts of it – Ester Boserup, Walter Rodney, Paul Richards, Robert Netting, Glenn Davis Stone, Million Belay to name a few. So I’ve certainly ‘looked’ at it. And I’ve been particularly influenced by Richards’ and Netting’s analyses of the ecological sophistication and economic dynamism of various West African agricultural societies.
It’s true there are some extremely impoverished small farmers in sub-Saharan Africa who haven’t willingly chosen their lot. There are also other small farmers in happier situations. Small-scale farming and ‘the’ rural economy is a many and varied thing. In the case of the poorest farmers, it’s worth pondering the reasons for their misery, some of which don’t reflect too well on the past and present actions of the richer countries of the world, and don’t have all that much to do with the rural economy of sub-Saharan Africa per se.
What I think must really be resisted is invoking poor African farmers generically as some kind of archetype of the small farmer standing outside of modern history that’s supposed to prove the inherent misery of low-energy agrarianism. I’ve noticed quite a lot of this ‘African gambit’ lately in narratives around manufactured food. It’s an example of the agricultural improvement ideology I criticized in Saying NO… (and, for that matter, in A Small Farm Future). Its history is an ignoble one, deeply enmeshed with colonialism and expropriation, with its readymade argument that dispossessing people of their land in favour of more ‘efficient’ food technologies imported from elsewhere is in their own best interests. When I was researching Saying NO… more than one food sovereignty activist described the ‘farm-free’ microbial food idea to me as a white saviour narrative, and I think they have a point. It’s worth listening to some African agrarian voices.
But maybe I can develop my wider point by switching the focus from Africa to Asia – specifically to Taiwan, South Korea and China. There are plausible arguments that suggest the unyoking of small farmers from stifling appropriations played a big part in kickstarting the rising wealth of each of these countries during the 20th century (see for example Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, and Lyn White’s Rural Roots of Reform Before China’s Conservative Change). Given the challenges before us in gracefully contracting the global economy, the problem may be less the supposedly low output and misery of the small farmer so much as their high output and economic dynamism. It’s not a problem I’m going to lose too much sleep over in the present state of the world, but it’s worth being aware that world economies can and have been built on local agricultural systems. My hope is that local economies can and will be built on them in the future, because frankly I don’t see too many other options.
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Good one!
I long ago concluded that what large scale, high input (artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, energy intensive machines…) offer the world is cheaper (in dollars and other units of currency) food, not more abundant food, or even healthier or more nutritious food). That’s because the capitalist Market system rewards what it calls “efficiency” — which it measures as a ratio of profit to financial costs. That is, industrial agriculture is particularly good at replacing human labor hours with machines and chemicals, and thus outcompeting small scaled, local agriculture in the Market.
But “efficiency” so measured does not internalize what are by economists called “cost externalizations,” and certainly would not be profitable, or even competitive, if it did. Cost externalizations are “paid” — if at all, and usually not — by parties not involved directly in any of the decision-making. That is, ecosystems and the biosphere, public health and social well-being, are not counted as the “costs” in the Market System. They are … well…, irrelevant to Market Forces.
In this respect, industrial agriculture is precisely akin to all of capitalist industrial Market Forces.
And now the bill has come to the table.
Nice job pointing out the framing of the questions. Nobody can respond to a call for a realistic explanation of how a high energy, resource intensive future will work out successfully on a finite planet. A phenomenal amount of the world’s resources have been used in the past 60 years. Even 3% growth requires a doubling of today’s extraction and consumption in the next 30 years.
Which leads to the questions: Where do those resources come from ? Is that realistic ? Explain. Mike ? noil ? Jeremy ? George ? Why so quiet, what say you ?
Chris wrote: “…using organic methods without synthetic fertilizer or pesticides… would translate to using about 32 percent of Britain’s existing farmland to feed its 67 million population.”
That point is hugely important. Local/national self-sufficiency of food production, as a way to overcome energy constraints and trade disruptions, is not some “cruel fantasy”.
Here’s a hypothetical: What would happen if the present-day globalised food systems were modified with two simple changes (while keeping the existing levels of food production in each country, accounting for losses and waste):
1. No exports of food.
2. No conversion of food crops to animal feed or biofuels.
A recent study looked at this hypothetical scenario, and found that “most of the world (127 countries and territories, 87% of the global population)” could achieve high levels of self-sufficiency without any additional production of food. (Only 6% of the global population would have a low degree of self-sufficiency with current production.) If we add in the amount of additional food “that could be grown on every street corner, every lot, every roof and every field in cities, towns, villages and countrysides the world over”, as Chris puts it, then complete self-sufficiency is conceivably possible for even more countries.
The areas with high levels of self sufficiency include all of North and South America (apart from some small islands) and all of Europe, plus Australia, most of Asia, and much of Africa. The “low self-sufficiency” countries include some relatively prosperous ones like Japan and Saudi Arabia, and some areas of recent strife such as Afghanistan and Libya.
“In this article we investigate the extent to which countries are nutritionally self-sufficient, as well as at which levels of production diversity this level of self-sufficiency is achieved. This analysis highlights the risks, or potential undesirable outcomes of the future (Wassénius and Crona, 2022), that exist to food supply in the context of trade-disruptive events. We do this through assembling a novel dataset on national food production covering all food sectors (both terrestrial and aquatic) and linking them to macro and micronutrient compositions. In light of the current war in Ukraine, we link the export of wheat from Ukraine and Russia to the risks we identify…”
The study used “existing data on national food production”, and is “a hypothetical exercise that does not consider the export of food products, or that food products are sometimes used for other purposes, such as feed or biofuels either domestically or abroad.”
The study, however, did not consider “the flows of feed, fertilisers, and pesticides that much of the current production system depends on.” This highlights some potential vulnerabilities due to energy constraints and supply chain disruptions which could affect conventional agriculture significantly more than local organic methods.
Map of countries and their levels of self-sufficiency:
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2211912423000032-gr3_lrg.jpg
Wassénius et al.
A global analysis of potential self-sufficiency and diversity displays diverse supply risks,
Global Food Security, Volume 37, 2023.
Wassénius et al.
A global analysis of potential self-sufficiency and diversity displays diverse supply risks,
Global Food Security, Volume 37, 2023.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912423000032
Fascinating — though I think “no conversion of food crops to animal feed” is, while an understandable constraint when looking at the demands of modern industrial farming, something of an inappropriate goal in a small farm scenario.
As has been mentioned here frequently, animals can provide:
– a certain amount of farm labour in the form of traction or even clearing an area
– a certain amount of pest control
– a form of caloric storage for those times of year when plants we can eat are difficult to grow and stored supplies are running low
– a sort of mobile composting service, concentrating nitrogen and other nutrients as well as complex microbial inoculants; this is useful not only for soil nutrition generally but also for season extension when used in techniques like hot beds
– clothing in the form of wool or hide; insulation in the form of feathers
– in extremis, some shared heat for living spaces
So, sure, humans *can* technically eat things like acorns, crab apples, or forage radishes. We can eat maize and we can eat oats. But in a small mixed farm situation it might well be sensible to feed some grain to your chickens and some oats to your horses or oxen and let your sheep graze a field that has a winter cover crop of daikon.
Things get even more blurry when you get into throwing kitchen waste to the pigs or chickens, or making silage with crop residues from human food crops, or eating the squirrels that go after your walnuts. When everything is interconnected like that, it starts to become difficult to figure out what is a “food crop” and what is not.
I think of Japan as having historically depended on fisheries to a fair degree; this may be inaccurate. Sadly between temperature increases and ocean acidification we may have mucked up fisheries to the point that they will not form any substantial part of food sufficiency in a small farm future. I have toyed with the idea of aquaculture at the allotment, but decided against for now.
It’s interesting examining the development of my own beliefs about the ability of Britain to feed itself, over the years; I went from “yes, but it would be quite tough” in the mid-teens to “… actually this might be way too much work” in around 2018 and back to “yes, but it would require us to structure society very differently; meanwhile I may as well do the best I can where I am” over the last handful of years.
I agree with your rule of the thumb Chris: “Hence a rule of thumb that might surprise some: per hectare food productivity may vary in either direction with farm scale, but on the whole it can be treated as scale neutral. There’s no special reason to suppose that small farms will produce less food in aggregate by virtue of their size. In fact, there are reasons to suppose they’ll produce more.”
An acquaintances of mine, Rasmus Einarsson, just wrote a report for “Tables” on Nitrogen which has some interesting data for the nutritional side of the equation. https://tabledebates.org/building-blocks/nitrogen-food-system
His conclusion is that it would be possible, but hard, to feed 10 billion without synthetic N. Obviously, it will lead to other diets and production systems, but I don’t have to explain that to you.
“nutritional ” was perhaps a mistake in my comment, I meant the nutrient supply to crops and not to people.
A double challenge (from the article linked by Gunnar):
Feed 10 billion using no synthetic N fertilizer, coupled with no expansion of agricultural land.
“Research shows that it would very likely be possible to supply a world population of 10 billion with sufficient food entirely without the use of synthetic N fertilizer and without agricultural land expansion, but it would require a global average diet with less meat and other N-intensive foods [77,78,182,196,197]. A reorientation along these lines would also lead to major reductions in environmental N emissions.”
https://tabledebates.org/building-blocks/nitrogen-food-system
The only reason why industrial farming produces anything at all is because it uses so much land. Any crop that is grown over a larger area of land will yield more of that crop. Doesn’t matter if this is a GMO crop grown with pesticides and fertilisers or a heirloom seed with compost. Shouldn’t surprise anyone really. I’m pretty sure there is some element of corruption in this unceasing ridiculing of small-scale farming. For some reason people in urban areas are all meant to pretend that everything is going fine if they just manage to secure a job (maintaining the business as usual) and governments and industrial farmers can get on the program of GMOs… Perhaps one step would be to rename the role of farmer as a ecosystem or natural resource manager. Right now the role of a farmer seems far too simplistic – – produce as much food as possible using close to zero labour – – and really doesn’t account for the full complexity of roles that a true steward of the land would be aware of. It’s so difficult to change farming if people are not even aware of things like algae blooms from runoff, groundwater flow, nutrient loops, rates of soil formation, etc.
I am a small farmer with a hundred Mangalitsa pigs in S.Calif. The barley they eat is imported from northern tiered states , or abroad and reflects the energy cost of transport. Fuel price goes up ,feed price goes up.
There are no large pig feeding operations in Southern Calif. and in a population of 20 million people there are annually less than a thousand pigs grown here for restaurant or online sales. So all the pork consumed here comes from somewhere else. Globalization LA style.
But as a custodian of rare genetics I feel some obligation to struggle through that maybe someday millions of people again will have chickens and a pig in the backyard, a substantial garden, fruit trees and cooking skills to make it all again into little pieces of heaven, interrupted occasionally when hell breaks loose.
The world will shrink as energy costs eat every last bit of profit and with it holdouts like me. My farm is 100% solar battery power with an electric tractor. I have some farming skills, save seed, forage a bit for the pigs and enjoy trying to farm without fossil fuels. So I can feed my self and my family without fuel , easily. , Transporting pigs for processing, selling to the public, USDA, insurance, etc, and paperwork , expletive .
When people get hungry maybe they can rethink all the rules they have designed to crush me. It takes a lot of willpower to keep fighting back with the hope it might someday change.
Curiously most people skirt the question of replenishing their soils with nutrients. The Chinese peasantry went strong, for the most part, in supplying food for themselves and their “overlords” [including warriors and civil servants] without artificial fertilizers for several hundreds of years.
Seems to me we are a bit squirmish in discussing the need for new/old ways of collecting, treating [without much high tech], and distributing compost and human and animal waste to those small farms that we need so very much.
Kinda reminds me of a West coast Scottish farmer I talked too he said ” if everyone who came here would take a dump and take a rock home with them I would have the best farm in Perthshire . “
Thanks Chris.
You make excellent points, as usual. Though I’m not one who needs convincing.
As for those who do need convincing, I think you are much more polite than I would be.
I would ask them: “Okay, what percentage of your own food do you produce?”
Nearly always the number will be just about zero.
Personally, I have no patience for people who can’t distinguish the realm of ideas from the material world, so when I hear someone cite an article with projections of whatever physical outcome, I always want to ask them if they have actually tried said tactic.
To your credit, you have plenty of experience with small farming.
Maybe that’s a debate gambit – tell your opponents that you can prove your food production numbers; all they need to do is come to your farm and grow food for a year.
If they refuse, you can call them unserious chickens. Not to malign chickens.
But, while I think you are correct that there is the mathematical possibility of feeding Britain with a small farm future – and that is likely the best option – I think it is fitting to remember that such a small farm society has never been tried at our current large population numbers and density.
The numbers aren’t the problem. The people are the problem.
I know you have done much more reading on this topic than I have, but my reading suggests to me that when human population densities get above a certain point, then human behavior becomes a problem, with oppression and war the most common result.
Unless the mass of people have somewhere less dense to go.
With the current human population there is nowhere to go.
It seems to me that people behaved pretty badly at much lower population densities than we have now, too. Remember that both urban overcrowding and colonial emigration were the result of, not the cause of, land enclosure….
Can small-scale farming feed Tokyo? History and current trends suggest “yes”.
Japan is a small-farm nation, with an average farm size of 3.1 hectares (according to the Financial Times). In 1960, when Tokyo’s population was around 17 million, Japan was largely self-sufficient with its food production!
“In 1960, Japan covered most of its domestic consumption by itself – the rate was 102 percent for rice, 100 percent for fruits and vegetables, and 91 percent for meats.”
https://thediplomat.com/2022/05/japans-food-self-sufficiency-debate-overlooks-the-core-problem/
Japan’s currently declining population (at least half a million less people per year) could eventually bring the numbers down to levels similar to 1960, when Tokyo was a megacity with a population of 17 million.
In 1960, Japan’s population was 94 million, and today it’s 123 million, but the population is now decreasing by at least a half million per year. This (cruelty-free) reduction in population could accelerate if birth rates decline further, while local food production efforts could be increased, resulting in less food imports and eventually self-sufficiency for Japan.
Self-sufficiency for Japan’s food production will likely be achieved sooner than the world’s transition to 100% renewables, IMHO.
This is great news, we can feed the UK on just over a third of the available farmland using small farms. And Steve L compounds the point, again great news.
Surely we can find academics to begin the process of mapping the mosaic of small farms, tight commons and wildlife corridors to bring more granular detail to these facts? These are the ‘plans’ we need ‘lying around’ in the crisis.
What are ‘bioregions’ in the UK? Can the areas be defined along the watersheds of rivers, like India? Between the Oxford Real Farming Conference and the Land Workers Alliance, can we begin to organise the work, research, mapping and envisioning of what this regenerative, sustainable, organic food (and fibre) system will look like?
I want to see that map – I want to be able to show it to people – use it as a point of reference to further discuss these issues. Again, great work Chris, thank you.
https://www.voiceofeurope.com/cuba-turns-to-un-for-help-amid-escalating-food-shortages/
Interesting piece .
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/01/exclusive-a-third-of-u-k-met-office-temperature-stations-may-be-wrong-by-up-to-5c-foi-reveals/
Interesting read .
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/29/welsh-farmers-are-the-canary-in-the-net-zero-coalmine/
Another interesting read , Wales does not want small farmers
Thanks for the comments. I’m stretched a bit too thin to reply adequately. I changed my Twitter strapline from ‘Small-scale farmer, writer…’ to ‘Writer, small-scale farmer…’ to more honestly reflect my work balance, and have been toiling solidly on various expected and unexpected farming duties ever since. How the gods toy with us.
Much to agree with, study and learn from in all that people have said above. Just a couple of further pieces to throw into the mix. Joel, I’d recommend taking my figure as a rough and ready low-end estimate and no more … probably in practice farming would occupy a bit more land. But I think it (and the interesting study Steve linked) are useful in showing that the main problem with moving to low impact agrarian localism isn’t land constraint. All your questions and ideas in your comment are bang on.
So the problem isn’t the land/numbers, the problem is the people … or at least the people’s anti-agrarian ideologies … yes, agree with Eric there. I do think there’s somewhere else to go … to more peopled and properly farmed countrysides, but I agree the prognosis isn’t that great, not least because of people’s endless appetite for techno-fix salvations. Thinking in terms of helping create long-term culture change and shorter-term refugia (as discussed in ‘A Small Farm Future’ & by Kathryn recently) is where I’m now at. Stable, local agrarianism doesn’t get a lot of airtime in our views of history, but though unaccented I think it’s been more widespread than we sometimes suppose, and all I think we have to try to build on its examples.
Thank you for this. I think it’s so important to push back against this kind of facile sneering that a sane agricultural system couldn’t feed the world, that the solution is always more production rather than fairer distribution, etc etc. The Peasants’ Republic of Wessex is still my favorite out of all your writings, and you’ve played a big part in making me realize the productive potential of a small-scale, localized food system. Thanks to you I also became aware of Simon Fairlie’s book, which is indeed very good. While numbers aren’t the be-all end-all, sometimes it’s also very useful to able to quantify an argument like this and show people that it could work out.
It’s demoralizing that industrial agriculture still has such a chokehold on most people’s imaginations, even now that it should be clear how unwise an idea it was and is. I suppose it’s a combination of basic intuition and untested assumptions (ie. “of course we wouldn’t be doing all this stuff if it wasn’t effective”) plus our old friend the Religion of Progress, to borrow John Michael Greer’s phrase. Either way, I’m grateful for writers like Fairlie and you who dig into those assumptions and show that it’s not as simple as the industrial proponents claim.
https://slaynews.com/news/wef-pushes-ban-home-grown-food-fight-climate-change/
There are powerful forces dead set against small farms ,there future seems more like the Matrix !
Can you point me to the policy, article, report, etc. on the World Economic Forum Website ( https://www.weforum.org/ ) where they are pushing for a ban on home gardens ?
They are the epitome of Business as Usual but that seems a little far fetched even for them.
https://slaynews.com/news/wef-pushes-ban-home-grown-food-fight-climate-change/
This research, conducted by WEF-funded scientists at the University of Michigan, was published in the journal Nature Cities.
btw, this article also seems to be of some relevance for the discussion in small vs big farms and the geographic distribution of production. I haven’t read it with a critical eye though, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519617300074
I haven’t read this one yet, either, but it looks interesting:
“Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms”
“Small farms constitute most of the world’s farms and are a central focus of sustainable agricultural development. However, the relationship between farm size and production, profitability, biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions remains contested. Here, we synthesize current knowledge through an evidence review and meta-analysis and show that smaller farms, on average, have higher yields and harbour greater crop and non-crop biodiversity at the farm and landscape scales than do larger farms.”
Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms
Ricciardi et al.
Nature Sustainability, 2021
Full PDF:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vincent-Ricciardi-3/publication/350400524_Higher_yields_and_more_biodiversity_on_smaller_farms/links/605e2344458515e83472e1a1/Higher-yields-and-more-biodiversity-on-smaller-farms.pdf
This seems relevant
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-08-25/monbiotic-man/
“… notably Hannah van Zanten’s calculation that the processing and food wastes generated by the sort of vegan diet that George [Monbiot] advocates, when fed to livestock, produce meat sufficient to meet more than a quarter of all human protein requirements. If this was one of the 5,000 academic papers that Monbiot claims to have read during the research for this book, he apparently thought it was of no significance …”
I seem to recall that converting such ‘waste’ to eggs, butter or cheese is more energy-efficient than converting it to beef or lamb. Eggs are generally labelled as a source of ‘first-class protein’, with a better amino acid balance than beans or even meat/dairy. So it might be worth looking at producing more eggs and cheese and less meat.
If you want to keep a flock of hens going indefinitely, you’re going to have to:
a) eat some of the hens when they stop laying
b) hatch some chicks some of the time
Roughly half the chicks are going to be male, so they won’t be laying any eggs. Makes a lot of sense to eat them.
If you want to keep a small herd of dairy cattle, you’re going to have to breed them once in a while or the cows don’t initiate milk production (maybe it’s possible to do this with high-tech hormonal interventions instead? But there are other issues with that.) So you need a steer or two in the local population, and again, some of the calves won’t be female and won’t ever produce milk. Your options are to eat the calves, grow them on a bit and eat them then, or maybe — if you have time and expertise — teach them to pull a plough or a cart.
Ditto sheep, though I don’t think sheep will pull a plough, it’s too heavy for their little legs. (I think they can pull carts though). Goats, too.
It seems likely to me that the “right amount” of meat to eat is the amount that is necessary to keep your dairy and egg production going; and the “right amount” of dairy and egg production is the amount that is produced as a by-product of using ungulates and poultry for traction, pest control, and nutrient processing in the rest of the farm — both in terms of processing wastes and crops that humans can’t eat into food that we can, and in terms of processing wastes and crops that humans can’t eat into fertilizer that can be used on crops that humans can eat.
What that actually looks like in practice will vary according to local context, though.
Thanks for the further comments. I hope to come back to some of these points, especially low impact livestock, but I’m moving on now to try to wrap up my posts about ‘Saying NO…’
2 for your perusal .
https://winepressnews.com/2024/03/05/eu-defiantly-passes-flagship-nature-restoration-law-amidst-protests-allows-massive-land-grabs/
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/net-zero-national-security-threat-must-be-abandoned-former-security-minister-warns.
“The debate about the greenhouse gas emissions from cows, sheep and goats has taken up far too much space and been isolated from the bigger discussion of how we manage landscapes and how we create sustainable agro-ecosystem. The main feat of grazing animals is that they are net contributors of nutrients to the agri-food system and that they maintain very bio-diverse landscapes. The main drawback of grazing animals is that they use much land that could be filled with wild herbivores and that farmers, ranchers and herders tend to be very hostile to predators.” – https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/a-nail-in-the-coffin-not-really?
from Gunnar Rundgren’s recent essay about the debate on sequestering carbon in agricultural land.
Great article, thank you.
Hi Chris. Just wondering if there is any room in your smallholding model for growing things like chamomile or peppermint? I wonder how that would be beneficial for attracting pollinator insects. Tea leaves are obviously not eaten and so would provide quite a lot of nutrient rich organic matter for the veggie patch. I was thinking perhaps more people could be enticed to become smallholders if we include a few crops that are not considered essential as such in terms of providing sufficient calories.
Thanks Daniel. Yes, there’s room for pollinator crops and other kinds of diversity in the garden!
Hi Chris, really lovely, thought provoking work. Thank you for writing and sharing. I intuitively agree with everything you’re saying (I’m relatively new to the agriculture conversation and its practice in modernity), so I was wondering about something you said that struck me. You wrote, “ I’ve been clear in my analysis that present forms of urbanism are an outcome of cheap fossil energy and are unlikely to survive unscathed in the energy squeeze to come.” I’m curious about the energy squeeze to come you reference. Despite modernity’s shortsighted belief that fossil fuels will last close to forever, or we’ll “technologize” our way out of fossil fuels into a breakthrough solution that enables us to continue our reckless use of energy, when do you foresee this energy squeeze happening? Is it already happening? I know it’s hard to say, but I’m very curious if you’ve done any research into the runway of current fossil fuel usage.
Cheers and many thanks,
Luke
Thanks Luke. I’ve tracked aspects of this issue over the years. My latest comment on it is here – https://chrissmaje.com/2024/02/how-many-solar-panels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin-thoughts-on-the-eschatology-of-energy-transition/ but I might write something a bit more detailed on it in due course. I think there are different kinds of energy squeezes, some of which are already happening. It seems to me more or less a given that if there isn’t an energy squeeze then there’ll be a climate change squeeze.
Coming in as the author of the “pipe down” comment to say sorry I was a bit rude and that I’ve come round a lot more to your arguments, Chris. Thanks for your reply and writings
Thanks Ben, appreciated. Rare to get such peace offerings in online debate!