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Posted on April 21, 2024 | 43 Comments
I mentioned in a recent post that my mother died at the end of last year. This has imposed a certain amount of emotional and bureaucratic labour on me – one reason why I’ve been a bit less active on this blog of late. But now that she’s with the ancestors, I want to write something about ancestral connection in present times, taking my mother’s life as my starting point.
My mother was the eleventh and youngest child of Mary and James. James spent his working life as a coalminer in South Yorkshire. His great grandfather, John, was born in 1799 and farmed eight acres near Aberdeen – the last of my direct ancestors to my knowledge who worked primarily on the land. Mary’s father died in the Peckfield Colliery Disaster of 1896 when she was a month old. His name was William Sheldon. You can read about him here.
The Wikipedia entry about the disaster doesn’t mention this and I don’t know if it’s true, but a story handed down to me from my mother is that the colliery owners paid off the widows of the dead men up to the point in their shift when they were killed, and then left them to pick up the pieces (though it seems they stumped up 5% of the relief money later collected for the families. Thanks guys).
I often hear it said that we shouldn’t romanticise the vanished rural world of people like my thrice-great grandfather John. It’s true enough. But nor should we romanticise the industrial world of people like my great grandfather William. This is the world most of us still inhabit today.
Perhaps some would argue that deaths like William’s were a price worth paying to build the healthier and wealthier society of present-day Britain. I can’t share this view. Partly because of the way it treats certain people – working-class people in Britain, and in other parts of the world touched by British colonialism, and in the parts of the world today where people do dangerous work to furnish service to British consumers – as dispensable. And also because it seems to me this narrative arc of health and wealth is built on a lie of ever-compounding energy and wellbeing whose dark untruth smokes from the very stuff my great grandfather hewed from the earth, and from accompanying fictions like trickledown economics. I don’t think his and other deaths are a price worth paying for a few generations of high-carbon consumerism.
My mother told me that a pithead siren marked the changing of the shifts in the mining village where she grew up. If there was an accident in the mine, the siren would sound to summon rescuers. When they heard it at these irregular times, children in the local school like my mother knew that their fathers might be injured or dead.
I think my mother carried a certain stress and sadness with her. I wonder if some of it stemmed from such traumas of our present industrial age manifested so viscerally within her family and her environment.
My book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future was published about five months before my mother died. She asked if she could listen to the audiobook version, but I couldn’t find any tech that she could realistically manage by herself to play it. Her mind and memory remained sharp enough to the end, but simple devices like phones and remote controls got harder for her even so, and my visits were increasingly taken up with more pragmatic aspects of her care. I regret I didn’t make a better effort for her to hear my book, but in what proved the last night of her life I had nothing to do except be there with her. She was unresponsive by then, but I picked up the copy of my book I’d given her and read a few pages. I doubt my book will feature in too many deathbed reckonings, but it’s featured in at least one.
The main cause of death noted on her death certificate is a degenerative condition with a fancy-sounding medical name, but ‘Frailty of old age’ is also recorded. The latter will do, I think. She had lost meaningful connection with the world of busy people, and of busy things like smartphones and Bluetooth earbuds. It was as if she’d mentally decided to die, but it took her body a little while to come up with a physical excuse for it. And her fighting spirit wasn’t quite at peace with the decision.
While this was going on in my private life, Saying NO… was trying to make its way in the world of public debate. This brought me into conflict with two high-profile men, one a sometime radical who seems to be moving rapidly if unwittingly towards congruence with neoliberalism, at least in its tamed 21st century “private sector innovation within the matrix of government is saving the planet and helping the poor” styling, the other a conservative once in the thick of the spikier anti-statist neoliberalism of the Thatcher/Reagan moment, who now espouses heavy state regulation to deal with the problems of the present. Both men have said that radical change to the status quo is necessary to address climate change and other challenges. Both men have also taken exception to my argument that once the fossil economies that were built on the labour of people like my maternal ancestors become untenable, deurbanization is the likely result.
In the 1960s, the decade in which my mother became a mother, rural people outnumbered urban people worldwide by nearly two to one. Now there are about four urban dwellers for every three rural ones. It’s a massive change, but a very recent one, and it’s relied on abundant supplies of cheap capital, energy and water that our descendants are unlikely to be able to rely on in their turn.
Those who say that radical changes are necessary to meet the challenges of our times but can only treat with scorn the possibility that part of those changes might involve reversing the breakneck capitalist urbanization of recent decades do not strike me as people who are genuinely wrestling with the enormity of the changes upon us. They strike me as people who are desperately trying to cling to the status quo. In contrast to my mother’s individual death, I think the body of our collective contemporary world political economy is manifestly dying, while its mind in the form of its public culture is largely in denial. But the denial can’t mask the frailty of old age in our political economy. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I believe a major thing that lies behind this is a fear of individual death – an inability to face what becoming an ancestor involves, which means in turn an inability to honour our own ancestors.
I’ve spent too much time fruitlessly arguing against this ecomodernist creed. I want to turn now to better honouring the ancestors so as to be the best ancestor I can be to any future descendants who might have need of me – the kind of work charted in books like Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity. This is painstaking work of long-term cultural renewal that no one person can achieve, and that cannot be framed in terms of quick-fix solutionism or three-point plans for saving modern urban humanity in the final chapter of a book.
A critic of mine has described me as a ‘lost man’. Although I need to care a bit less what people say about me, I find this description quite sweetly engaging, and one I can embrace. Yes, I do feel lost in contemporary modernist culture, in what seem to me its petty concerns, its self-aggrandizing narratives and its telling silences. I’m not the only one who feels lost in it, but currently perhaps we’re in the minority. Patronising as it may sound, I think many who don’t consider themselves to be lost in it look pretty lost to me, the more so as they stridently affirm its bright future and the bold directions they believe it to be taking.
I’m currently reading Noreen Masud’s extraordinary book, A Flat Place. She describes how in Pakistan, the country where she grew up that was created in 1947 as an artefact of British colonialism, people have never found an answer to what it means to be Pakistani. The country, she says, is stuck in a postcolonial drift where “in the absence of concrete answers, modern Pakistan is constructed on acts of exclusion which are both extremely strict and extremely vague” (p.105). I believe this will ultimately be the fate of most countries, with catastrophic consequences, unless their peoples find better ways to connect with their ancestors, and to connect with themselves as ancestors.
‘Better’ does not mean more adoring, more romanticised, more nostalgic or more sacralising. But I’m done with the colonial arrogance of modernist thought in its conviction that lives past and present geared to local material livelihood-making must always and inherently be more miserable and limited than modern urban-industrial lives. It seems unlikely to me that many of the modern-day technological appurtenances so baffling to my mother will count among the gifts that present generations hand on to succeeding ones. And equally unlikely that the pursuit of greater primary energy supplies or more and cheaper food will deliver the gift of increased wellbeing to them – the historical precedents on that score really aren’t that good. What will count among our gifts instead seems to me an increasingly urgent question, to which our civilisation needs to find better answers than its present ones.
So once I have properly buried my dead, honoured what I can honour in contemporary culture and laid to rest in my mind its profound busyness with things that seem to me to have lost meaningful connection with anything that much matters, I will start afresh with some new writing projects, beginning here on this website. Slowly. Scratching for a long-term cultural reckoning with past, present and future, and not trumpeting some brash solution to the problems of modernism conjured from its own ageing box of tricks.
Carwyn Graves Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape
Noreen Masud A Flat Place
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That’s beautiful. Keep writing.
Excellent piece, and thankfully not naming people who once appeared to have little better to do than oppose your well-reasoned arguments about farming with academic waffle that both misrepresented facts and manipulated them to further their own sad fantasies for Utopia I simply couldn’t stomach (excuse the pun) their ideas.
Let’s have more thoughts from you on how cultures worldwide can and should seek to return, where possible to a rural existence where ‘growth’ and ‘wealth’ are measured in true human values that have little if anything to do with the capitalist obsession with money and the attribution of worth in those terms only. I always shudder when I see such comments as, ‘It now costs approximately £150,000 to bring up a child, and see it through to adulthood.
What cobblers, and what a way to think about our time on earth.
This is perhaps the most poignant and hopeful piece of writing I’ve read from you. I hope you explore this theme more extensively in the future. As our modern economy/lifeways fragments families both geographically and philosophically, it is quite challenging to find effective avenues of communication between ancestors and moderns, but it is a worthy goal. Thank you again. I hope this sparks conversations here and elsewhere.
I am very sorry for your loss. It is hard to lose one’s mother. Please accept my condolences.
This was a beautiful piece of writing and I’m glad you are going to be going in this direction in future posts, and not be wasting your time arguing with pinheaded people who don’t know their elbow from their rear ends, as several people in my family used to say.
Thank you Chris, and take care as you come back to this, and step further into being an ancestor.
Yes, thank you Chris for a good and thoughtful essay.
That’s an interesting viewpoint – living so as to be a good ancestor.
I have been having similar thoughts, since I’m fast headed that way myself.
It’s complicated by the fact that I have made the conscious decision to not have direct descendants. But, still…
I’m pleased that you intend to keep working on this.
And the ‘lost man’ bit.
Nearly all the men I know are American. Generalizing, all of us are at least a little bit lost.
Many of my fellow (male) Americans are deeply lost and wholly without a clue that it is so. The women less so, and I think this is a salient fact.
Most of us have seen some of the various gurus and their efforts (shenanigans?) to plaster over modern male lostness.
I’d like to believe that most of us see how that sort of thing at best misses some point or other, and is at worst, worse.
Not that I have a solution either. But the symptoms are quite clear, and point to some fundamental inhumanness in our modern world. The rejection and denial of our animal bodies. Fear of death, as you say.
For a number of years, my wife and I have been doing a social-dance dialect of Argentine Tango. From this we learn that it is possible to have a deep and subtle conversation with another person, using body language.
The topic always seems to be human relationships.
Also, when using body language, it isn’t possible to tell lies.
But for this conversation to happen, one must pay close, unbiased attention to one’s partner. The men I dance with seem to have much more difficulty with this than the women. I relate this to the disembodiedness of our modern society. And the mostly male personality of our modernity.
When I drive a brush hog through ten foot tall weeds, I don’t pay attention to all of the species I’m shredding. It isn’t possible, it’s just a gross application of horsepower. This is an easy habit to get into when we have so much horsepower at hand. But it doesn’t work in any kind of mutual relationship, human or otherwise.
Also from dancing, I learn that is nearly impossible to give a clue to someone who doesn’t know they need one. Though when they stumble upon a clue, the rewards are obvious.
But the old habits are still very hard to break.
Thanks.
Totally agree with you Chris .
Nothing changes , from the pit owners and mill owners to today’s ” elite ”
This frightens the crap out of me ! Watch the WEF guy say the scientists will build the “elite” an arc the rest of us will drown . The age old battle is still with us , our ancestors did the best they had with what they had , our future is not looking rosy ,” science ” might abandon the majority to provide for the ” elite ” , I hope the pre industrial farming techniquies I have handed down will become usefull to my decendants when I become an ancestor .
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/04/20/a-collective-common-enemy-now-stalks-mankind/
Regarding ancestors and “scratching for a long-term cultural reckoning with past, present and future…”
These days, even our heritage sadly seems to be largely monetized. What’s being passed down from generation to generation may be primarily monetary wealth (if there is any), instead of a wealth of livelihood skills and cultural traditions. Former homes (and farms) are often liquidated, sold to the highest bidder, and any leftover money is passed down to heirs.
Even the language of ancestors can be lost. Similar to how indigenous languages can die from lack of usage (and lack of sufficient interest from successive generations), I’ve been noticing other types of colonization or assimilation concerning how we humans relate to our environments.
For example, I think that detailed (sometimes intricate, and sometimes localized) cultural knowledge about how to get things done using non-electric or non-fossil powered tools is being lost. Human craftsmanship, artisanal skills, and basic handiness seem to be dwindling in the physical (non-virtual) world.
If/when the fossil energy or electrical umbilical cord is cut in the future, most existing tools won’t work, and many people will be helpless or clueless about meeting their basic needs and making a living.
It is increasingly unlikely that I’ll ever become an ancestor in the sense of having any biological descendants, or even nieces or nephews; but a sense of connection to my own ancestors is certainly a part of my own gardening and foraging.
In my life as a choral composer, though, I think not in terms of becoming an ancestor, but in terms of leaving some kind of legacy. This isn’t in the sense of “making a mark” or gaining influence or fame, so much as making a contribution that future musicians can build on. This was also an approach I took to my music teaching when I was doing that regularly. I don’t know how well this sort of thing correlates to the work of raising children, and I’m not trying to claim here that the work is the same (I got to give the piano students back to their parents after a half hour or so), any more than choral composition and growing beetroot are the same (they aren’t, though both are worthwhile). But in the absence of any offspring, I have had to feel my way toward a broader sense of continuity with those who will tend the land or make music after I do.
I started some dandelion wine this week. I haven’t tried it before. It had better be delicious, it took me two and a half hours to separate the yellow dandelion petals from the green calyx jobbies.
I’m curious about yoour dandelion wine recipe.
Did you add a sugar source? Acid source?
We get a vast crop of dandelion flowers – there are certain days in the spring when I can pick 3 gallons of flowers in a day.
I have the idea that dandelion wine might originally have been fermented mostly with the nectar that comes with the dandelions, but when my wife looked it up, the recipes all had added sugar, etc.
And those recipes produced some interesting and worthwhile wine that I’d hesitate to call delicious. There is not much difference when leaving the green calyxes on. Just more bitterness. About like your average IPA.
Good luck.
I added a sugar source and a couple of sliced oranges. I don’t want to think about how many dandelions I’d need if I were trying to get all the sugar from the dandelions themselves! Maybe the root extract, boiled for ages to denature some of the starches? But that would be unspeakably bitter.
Pascal Baudar’s work on wild winemaking is very good. I do tend to use sugar and commercial yeast, but it was reading one of his books that gave me the confidence to basically just chuck things into the stockpot in approximately the right quantities, wait a few days, and then strain the resulting liquid into a demijohn; I will give various online recipes a cursory glance, but I’m not really worried about following them exactly.
Meanwhile, my lactic acid ferment of lovage and elephant garlic stems is smelling kinda funky, and I can’t tell at this stage if it’s “hey, this contains alliums” funky or “hey, maybe don’t eat this” funky. Ho hum.
Some of our 19th-century ancestors wrote down recipes for dandelion wine, mulberry wine, etc., and even those recipes required sugar.
https://books.google.com/books?id=K0oCAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA257#v=onepage&q&f=false
Beyond the possibilities for domestically produced beet sugar, this got me thinking about international trade and how cane sugar was available to “all levels of society” during the era of sailing ships.
“As Europeans established sugar plantations on the larger Caribbean islands, prices fell in Europe. By the 18th century all levels of society had become common consumers of the former luxury product… average consumption in Britain rose from four pounds per head in 1700 to eighteen pounds in 1800, thirty-six pounds by 1850 and over one hundred pounds by the twentieth century.”
[Wikipedia, “History of sugar”]
I thought I had replied to this but it appears I haven’t…
A quick back-of-envelope calculation suggests my own household is somewhere between 1800 and 1850 levels in our sugar consumption, taking into account added sugar in purchased processed foods as well as the sugar I use for preserving, baking and so on. (The amount of purchased processed foods continues to fall as I grow and preserve more of my own, too.) But that said, there is something of a mismatch between consumption and production… in 2023 I abstained from making any jam or chutney for the sake of using up the backlog and we are still working our way through the 2021 jam. We have wine going back to 2021 too. So I’m not sure whether that sugar should count as being “consumed” until after we eat it.
(This year I am planning on blackberry jam, because we don’t have any, but probably no other jam; and my wine plans include rhubarb wine and elderberry wine, but I have no need to make elderflower wine, blackberry wine, plum wine or indeed grape wine for a good while yet. Chutney… we’ll see.)
The other thing I was going to comment on was sugar and colonialism, but I see Chris has beaten me to it; I’ll read that post before commenting further. Non-cane sugar sources of sucrose are available, but sugar is essentially an industrial ingredient.
A beautiful post, thank you. This is the work and we are lucky that it is outside the scope of modernity, it is ours to do.
I was talking to Alice about humour this morning and remembering Camus and the ‘inevitability of happiness’. His sense of the absurdity of life sits well in these topsy-turvy times, and recalls the Rabelaisian brilliance of medieval thought. You have to be lost to be found!
The Modernists (eco- or not) really have a problem with “the Past”. Even things that were totally normal hundred years ago have to be dressed up as “innovation”, preferably of a disruptive kind, to have appeal. Such as recycling or re-use or bioenergy or even fossil free steel (all steel was fossil free some hundred years ago).
Linked to this is the urge to paint the Past as a totally horrible place where people starved and women were chained to their stove only released – for a day – to squeeze out a child every year, a child that died.
For sure, life could be very hard in the Past. But part of that was a result of exploitation or unjustice. One need only to see all magnificent buildings of the past to realize that there was actually a substaintial surplus in those societies.
I am not so afraid of the Past but also quite interested into what of the good things of Now that we can salvage.
Firstly thank you for sharing that with us
Over twenty years ago my now ex (and sadly late) father in law was talking about growing up near Chatham and as a four year old watching the D-Day invasion fleet assemble. It was the only time they met and my father was frail and in the last year of his life but he suddenly burst into life with ‘I was on one of those ships’
Clearly fate had placed him and my grandfathers who both served in WW1 on the right side of history in a way that an ex girlfriends schoolmates who ended up in the US Army in Vietnam were in the wrong side.
So, yes how can we be ‘Good Ancestors’ clearly chance hasnt given me the cards my parents generation were dealt so I must find my own way.
Have I done enough? Well, almost certainly not.
Could I do enough?
Perhaps
Thanks for the comments & support. Hopefully I’ll return to some of the themes you’ve opened up – gender issues, legacy vs memory, non-verbal communication, local practical knowledges without power tools, elite control, premodern culture etc.
I’ve been thinking about the orphan, partly because my grandfather was orphaned but really because of a notion that we have been orphaned by modernity. That there is no tradition that can claim it has not been cauterised and truncated by the Great Game. This leaves us in a refreshing position of finding these traditions anew, through the body and nervous system we have inherited.
An interesting exchange between Douglas Rushcroft and Manda Scott, was that we need to kill their gods (from Exodus) and we could say, kill all gods. Like Carnival, God will endure this death.
To be a good ancestor could be to pass on the skills of survival, which have there social/cultural modalities, perhaps in an embodied psychology of compassion and care, and good humour. Alice’s reading of current culture is that it is shot through like a stick of rock with masculine trauma (no its not just for men). It’s the basis of our fear, our Xenophobia and perception of scarcity. A brief read through of comments on most others sites of this ilk, The Road by Cormac McCarthy soon comes up.
If we can do anything for the generations to come, it will be to relieve ourselves of this scelorotic archetype.
Interesting thoughts – thanks. I’m not totally convinced by the killing gods idea, but I like how you link it to carnival renewal. Hope to come back to this!
I agree about masculine trauma. The problem as I see it is that it doesn’t take too many traumatised/militarised males and/or their masculinist societies to cause a lot of trouble – the likes of David Graeber & David Wengrow argue that whole world-historical epochs have suffered from this. But I think they possibly overstate their case, and there’s a lot to be said for trying to build resilient alternatives. Again, food for future discussion…
I think Miki Kashtan has written a book on this; I haven’t read it (yet).
BTW interesting debate going on with Cameron Roberts under an old post that some might be interested in here: https://chrissmaje.com/2024/03/the-hungry-ones/#comment-263006
Re Steve’s point about sugar, I wrote this post a long time ago about my late mentor Sidney Mintz, which bears on the issue: https://chrissmaje.com/2016/01/sidney-mintz-1922-2015/. Sugar as the original globalized capitalist commodity crop, linking three continents via exploited labour.
I have duly weighed in, I hope I don’t seem like too much of a miseryguts.
Thanks for that Chris. An elegiac tone is quite fitting for both personal and wider unfolding reasons. Those of us that cannot capture thoughts in writing as skillfully appreciate those who can, and evocative writing also gives us opportunity for growth.
My initial engagement with your small farm project was that of the physical essentials; self provisioning, weaning off of fossil energy, but more and more over the years, for me the central challenge is about trying to blaze the path back to a human culture that is not just in harmony with the land, but fosters healthy relationships and respect for all, including other humans.
Fossil energy has enabled us in the west to be very mobile, to chase careers and opportunity wherever it leads, and in the process, atomizing and breaking generational ties and traditions. It also seems to have empowered the dark side of our nature rather more than the light.
Our three kids have launched well into their lives, but they are spread across the continent. We can only do so much to maintain connection. I cannot redo things, but am hoping that with my new awareness of truths that were always there, I can maybe be an example of rootedness in place, and hope of hopes, create a refuge, a place to come to and make roots.
oh, and sugar:
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2022/12/sugar-from-sugar-beets-homestead-style.html
A quarter cup of syrup to each beet seems not terrible yield, to me! Were the roots harvested before or after the frost? I know here it’s common to leave root vegetables in the ground until after the first frost in order to sweeten them up some.
My preferred processing method for regular beetroot is to give them a quick scrub (nothing too energetic), wrap them in foil (…yes, another industrial product, although at least aluminium is relatively easily recycled) and bake them in the oven for an hour or so, let them cool and then peel them. The peels come off very easily this way. I wonder whether a roasting tin with a decent lid would work as well as the foil, and I wonder whether sugar beets processed this way would be easier to handle; I am thinking I could just put them in the bottom of the oven when I’m cooking something else in there anyway, rather than running it specially. Perhaps I’ll experiment with some of my (red) beets this year; I don’t mine my sugar being pink.
I haven’t tried this yet, but apple juice can be boiled down to 1/7 the original volume, to result in a shelf-stable syrup. I’m thinking it would require less energy than collecting and boiling sap (or beet juice) to make a sweetener.
“Once concentrated, apple cider syrup will keep at room temperature indefinitely, which made it a valuable resource back when cider orchards were plentiful but refrigeration non-existent.”
Homemade Boiled Cider (Apple Cider Syrup)
https://practicalselfreliance.com/boiled-cider/
Possibly worthwhile, yes!
I do make apple butter — essentially, very concentrated applesauce — and plum butter, which is the same thing but with plums. I don’t have easy access to a cider press but I am considering fixing this; the thing about boiling apple syrup for long periods is that it does take a lot of energy, as well as filling the house with steam, so some kind of rocket stove setup outdoors might be more sensible…
I’ve tried that! We made a small batch of apple syrup and it was very tasty. In fact, the taste was pretty intense, so it couldn’t be used in recipes where you just want added sweetness, but it was a great topping for my yoghurt. I would make it again. As we’ve discussed, these preservation methods need a good bit of energy input. Most of my cider goes to hard cider, so the yeast does the preservation work.
The maple syrup from tree tapping takes a lot of energy to cook down, and while I have built a rocket stove that would work, it would require a lot more prep and attention if I switched. To Kathryn’s point, this is definitely outdoor work, lots of steam generated. I do use the stovetop to do the last bit, as you have to keep a close eye, and by then, most of the water has been driven off.
It may possibly be worth the time to *consider* using concentrated solar thermal energy for cooking down the long and slow process of making maple syrup and concentrated apple sweetness. Among these options are parabolic mirror and Fresnel lens systems. These can readily reach and sustain boiling temperatures for extended periods of time, especially with a simple and inexpensive solar tracking system keeping the sun properly agreed with the process. But, of course, there is dependency upon sunny days for such, but maybe not as much sun as you may imagine.
At least, the solar tracking systems *ought* to be pretty affordable by now, given the rather dramatic technological advancements (very simple, really) which have recently been developed in the field.
It may be necessary, however, to first partially cook down the sheer bulk of these liquids for a while using wood heat for boiling. Because only a very sophisticated solar thermal system would likely be useful until the concentration of the sugar / water ratio allowed for a less sophisticated solar thermal solar tech apparatus. That is, if one lives in the UK, and not in New Mexico, a place where the sun is almost always shining (for better and worse).
I’m about to work all of this out with the R&D company I’m helping to nudge into the world. So I’m becoming increasingly familiar with what is possible at lower financial cost with such solar technologies.
There is a rocket stove commercially available here that has a sort of back hatch and sits in a pan of water, allowing for longer burn times and lots of biochar creation. I kindof want one.
@Kathryn
Do you have a link to the rocket stove, you’ve got your eye on?
I’d be interested in checking it out.
John
It’s the “Social Tawi” stove from Carbon Farmers: https://www.carbonfarmers.world/product/social-tawi-stove/
Pricey, but pretty versatile. If I needed another cookstove, I’d consider it, because if it works as pictured it would be about the most convenient way of producing charcoal while cooking that I’ve ever seen. (Alas, I have absolutely no need for another cookstove.)
@Kathryn
Thanks for the link.
Interesting bit of kit. Quite innovative. I like the three points of cooking, with the “grill”.
Took me a while to figure out how the biochar was made.
Be good to see one in action.
I don’t recall if we’d had first frost, but we just wanted to close down that section of garden, and the leaves were starting to fade anyway. As far as baking, or other ways to extract more sugar, I might try some other experiments, as I am pretty sure I was not getting a very good fraction. Maybe boil longer, or baking as you suggest would break down the beet fibers and release more sugar?
Can you get sugar beet or white mangel seed ? I’m not sure what they are called in Europe. I think the French or Germans grew them. They are noticeably sweeter than table beets.
Yes, I used sugar beet seeds. They do have a higher sugar content than table beets. Any improvement will be based on better technique.
@Kathryn
A Dutch oven instead of aluminium foil perhaps?
Yes, that’s the sort of thing I was thinking of.
Hi,
In the current issue of the Dublin Review of Books (online) there is an interesting essay on Andrew Kettle and his prominent role in the Irish land wars at the end of the 19th century. Here is a quote centred on the important of small farms to society:
“John Stuart Mill, rethinking his earlier economic views in the light of conditions in Ireland, argued that the small farm, basing production on the family or household unit, made for higher production and standards of living, as could be seen already in the wider European experience. Overseen by state provision, responsibility was thus assumed for the social questions of land distribution, food, and accommodation – instituting in the 1880s, for example, the first public housing schemes on these islands, as well as laying the basis for land distribution schemes in ‘congested districts’ and elsewhere. Market mechanisms had to be adjusted to local circumstances or ‘topographies of capital’ (to adapt Caitlín Doherty’s phrase): there was no universal science, no iron laws of economic necessity.”
More at: https://drb.ie/articles/the-third-man/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/bureaucrats_descend_like_locusts_onto_california_s_famed_napa_valley_winemakers_report.html
In the subject of wine there are ways of stopping small farmers from making a living
Joel Salatin wrote about it in 2007: Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal’. People were reportedly so naive that they thought it made sense to use the USDA to regulate ‘organic agriculture’. This system seems to have been a replacement for multiple schemes that had been in existence before but people seemed not to have a clue what invariably happens in huge organisations, i.e. power corrupts and absolute power …
One difference Salatin noted is that small regenerative enterprises often have a total ‘open door’ policy and welcome visitors looking over the farm. Agribusiness has ‘biosecurity’ and ‘keep out’ notices all over the place. Julian Rose gave a good recent interview to UK Column on what seems like the Soil Association’s rather cosy relationship with agribusiness and supermarkets, dating back 20 years. Rose was once on the SA’s Board.
Yep and beauracracies fail to talk to each other . I worked on a animal feed mill , the ministry of AG insisted we kept the feral pigeons ( classed as vermin ) “under control” , poisons were banned ,( ministry of AG food regulations ) trapping was deemed inhumane ( department of the environment )so we shot them with air rifles , and got a police visit every time this happened , it was interesting to watch the min of AG guy laying he law down to the police inspector , the ministry of AG won after a day at the magistrates court but we were harassed every time shooting took place
Thanks for the new comments – noted with interest. I appreciate Caroline’s points about Ireland – there’s been a lot of positive understanding of small farms historically, but it tends to get written out of history.
Even in the 20th century (1940s), small farms with “owner cultivators” were seen as something to encourage with land reform policies in an independent Scottish state, as a means of creating “healthy local community”.
“More precisely, as Robert McIntyre put it, an independent Scottish state would seek land reform involving ‘the limitation of private ownership of land and the encouraging of owner cultivators responsible to the community for their good husbandry.’ SNP policy in the 1940s regarded further industrialisation of rural areas as undesirable. For rural Scotland, the party argued, ‘crofting is socially and ethically desirable’, since it created a healthy local community, and could be made economically viable by combining it with ‘part-time employment in local industry such as weaving, forestry, fishing or other local productive activities’.”
The Case for Scottish Independence
Ben Jackson, Cambridge University Press, 2020, p.26