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Posted on May 2, 2024 | 122 Comments
Given my conviction that humanity’s long-term future is likely to revolve around low-energy local agrarianism, I’ve long pondered whether the example of people who’ve pursued that way of life in the past – namely peasantries – is relevant to this future scenario. The answer, I believe, is the same as the answer to many tricky social-political questions: yes and no. But I’m always interested in sources that can put a bit more nuance to it.
One such source is a recent book by the eminent historian, Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Allen Lane, 2024). A ‘personal history’ because Joyce’s parents were born into Irish peasant families and he draws in the book on that connection, as well as on historical sources from Galicia (spanning present-day Poland and Ukraine), Italy, Spain, France and … not many other places. So, a book about Catholic, European peasantries. It might have been illuminating to cast the net a bit wider and seek comparisons with somewhat more intact peasantries outside Europe, or maybe even to what’s probably the closest thing we still have to a peasantry in the British Isles, namely (non-Catholic) Welsh upland farmers. But no doubt a case can be made for depth instead of breadth.
As is my usual way, I’m not going to attempt to summarise or review the book so much as draw out themes from it I find informative. But first a word on the wider social science of peasantries, which has focused on three broad topics.
Joyce’s book has regrettably little to say on the first of these, as alas is the case in most social science treatments outside rather specialist sub-disciplines. It also has mercifully little to say on the second. Actually, that’s not entirely true. There’s quite a lot about modernisation. What’s merciful is that he doesn’t follow the well-worn trail of modern social science in cheerleading the demise of peasantries and trying to baptise them into the modern world as capitalists, communists, nationalists, citizens or displaced urbanites. Instead, his tone is mostly matter of fact, if occasionally elegiac.
But where the book really scores is in the depth of its analysis around peasant culture. Since I closed my previous post by saying that I want to turn in future work to a focus on long-term cultural change towards agrarian localist futures, I’m interested in any lessons to be learned from the culture of agrarian localist pasts that books like Joyce’s can provide.
For his part, Joyce seems to refuse this project: “In an age of climate crisis, and the almost untrammelled capitalism and political self-interest driving it, something is to be learned from peasants’ connection to the cosmos. All the same, we cannot go back and be peasants. I did not write this book to make peasants tutors to the present” (p.115).
Well, fair enough, although if there are things to be learned it’s a shame not to seek tutors for them, and this refusal does lead to a rather bleak and unsatisfactory ending to the book, which seems to suggest that capitalist realism has obliterated almost every meaningful possibility of connecting with peasant culture, and with the past in general.
So is all that’s left memory and elegy, and nothing really to be learned after all? I don’t think so. Capitalist realism is only a historical moment, and while, sure, we can’t ‘go back’ and be the peasants of the past, we might ‘go forward’ into the future as agrarian localists who can learn from them.
Joyce mentions that times can be hard in modern rural Ireland if you’re not on the tourist trail. I take tourism here to stand for something more general: a flow of service into favoured parts of the world, based on cheap energy and the global overproduction of capital. Whereas the ideology of (eco)modernism believes this flow will increase and ramify, the opposite seems to me a more likely trend. Tough times in rural Ireland off the tourist trail are a harbinger for tough times more generally.
So, to reiterate, what interests me is any lessons to be learned from peasant cultures that weathered the hard times of the past and that might help us navigate the hard times of the future. Like Joyce, I’ll focus here on peasant culture, but I want to remark in passing that it’s also worth looking to the practicalities of peasant livelihood-making. Joyce is rather dismissive about rural life museums with their collections of bygone hand tools and visitor experiences like building an old-style wall. On the contrary, I think you can learn a hell of a lot from such places.
Joyce makes the point that peasant cultures are often very old, in some cases involving practices and ideas that stretch way back to pre-Christian and pre-classical times. In a sense, there are peasant civilisations which have grown alongside but are different to those of the elites that we tend nowadays to see as ‘civilisation’ itself.
These peasant cutures are also keyed to local farmed landscapes, which are sanctified by many material markers, including the buried ancestors. As Joyce puts it, “in ‘advanced’ western societies the dead in general are too happily put away, banished from our easily forgetful minds …. in putting away the dead we also put ourselves away. Peasants were good at remembering the dead, respecting them, which is one of the best possible reasons for respecting them” (p.267).
Resonant words. But on the face of it, the historical depth of peasant cultures sounds like bad news for the agrarian localisms of the near future. In view of the crises we now face, we need to be building those localisms quickly, right now, and the ‘we’ in modern localities will often be people of disparate origin only recently connected to the local landscape – and often barely connected even then, lacking deep historical association with it.
Still, perhaps we can take some comfort all the same. Our bottom-up efforts to restitch ourselves into the local can seem so compromised, so puny in the face of the task before us, so ridiculous in the eyes of the proselytisers of global techno-modernity, that it’s easy to give up. Knowing that we’re just small nodes among a multitude of multigenerational actors who are incrementally and experimentally building a new agrarian civilisation over the long-haul might steel us to the task.
Another positive aspect of this long-haul perspective on cultural genesis is that it’s possible to embrace all the people who are here with us in place, without making invidious distinctions about who’s a ‘real’ local. Folklorists and antiquarians are welcome to represent the cultures of the past in this place, and we might be grateful for what we can learn from them. But our work is future focused. We’re not obliged to accept any particular version of the past. There’s a lot more to say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now.
Also, let’s remember what Joyce sometimes nearly forgets – our new peasant cultures are oriented to local livelihood production, to farming and to the production of food and fibre. That gives us a focus for our efforts. Here in Britain, and in many other places, there are still functional field systems with ancient origins, despite the ravages of the four horsemen through the millennia, as well as the fifth one in the form of techno-modernism and the ideology of agricultural ‘improvement’. Consider the slow work of endurance that’s preserved those field systems through all that. Joyce talks about the proverbial peasant powers of passive resistance, the imperviousness to short-term modern concepts of property and law. There’s some tutoring to the present for us right there.
Let’s get started then, in this place we now call home – let’s learn how to make it bear fruit, let’s bury our dead here, let’s start to make it sacred, and let’s seek the fortitude to endure.
The peasant social world Joyce describes is one of mediated tensions. In the household, women and men, parents and children. In the village, households of different wealth and social standing against but also alongside one another. The village against but sometimes with the landowners and the wider political world. Catholics and Jews in the Polish peasant village. Peasants as victims of violence, and as perpetrators.
I like it that Joyce doesn’t impose some resolving lens of modernist political thought on all this to define where the ‘real’ social power lies and determine how to capture it to achieve final political redemption. In advocating for small farm societies, I’ve often struggled with well-meaning but oversimplified attempts to contrast the individualism of modern capitalist societies unfavourably with the collectivism of peasant ones, which neglect how difficult and conflicted the collectivism is and probably always will be. Joyce brings out nicely the lived complexity of the individual- and the household-in-community of peasant society. Neither individualist nor collectivist. Not for nothing did agrarian sociologist Teodor Shanin call peasants ‘the awkward class’ in upsetting neat modernist categories.
Joyce emphasizes the balancing forces of unity and division in peasant society: peasant worlds where male dominance is “often more formal than real” (p.91), where a class system of peasants is “one version of the truth” (p.81), where juridical forms of landownership and political power have their limits, and peasants have the “ineradicable conviction that the land was theirs” (p.58).
This is anathema to certain kinds of modernist thought, which regards it as mystification of ‘real’ underlying power relations. Marxism is a prime example. Joyce doesn’t have much truck with this, nor with mainstream Marxist appropriations of the peasant. He dismisses the idea of the villainous, rich, capitalist-oriented peasant or kulak of communist Russia as a myth of the Soviet imagination – and in fact a heroic countermyth of Russian peasants chafing under the control of the communist collective farm. The kulak as the archetype of autonomy and self-mastery that peasant ideology aspires to, instead of the reinvented serfdom involved in working for communist overlords (pp.232-5).
To be fair to communism – or, some would doubtless argue, to be unfair to it – it has its own authentic lineage in alienated peasant consciousness. This was the argument of the historian Norman Cohn, who saw in it echoes of the millenarian, collectivist, radical religious movements of the premodern past, with their alliances of disaffected intellectuals and the desperate poor, involving “phantasies of a final, exterminatory struggle against the ‘great ones’; and of a perfect world from which self-seeking would be forever banished” (The Pursuit of the Millennium, p.286).
Such phantasies of progress and redemption have deeply conditioned mainstream modernist thought, but it’s the more conventional currents of premodern peasant culture emerging from Joyce’s pages that I believe yield more promising political material for the future. Specifically, ideals of self-mastery in an imperfect world from which self-seeking can’t and probably shouldn’t ever be banished, but can hopefully be contained and transformed through wider collective institutions.
I’ll say more about those institutions in a moment. But a good feature of Joyce’s book is that he doesn’t romanticise peasantries into what he calls “the figure of the primitive, the peasant as elemental man” (p.28). He avoids this trap most successfully through his rich, warts-and-all accounts of peasant lifeways, and a bit less successfully by his occasional admonitions about the awfulness of peasant poverty and subjection.
The admonitions themselves are well grounded. The problem is I don’t think Joyce enquires carefully enough about the circumstances that make some peasants poor and powerless, and others not (I’ll pass over that ignorant modernist tic which assumes all peasants, all agrarians, all ordinary people in the past have necessarily been gruesomely poor and powerless). Actually, I think a little bit more Marxism could have informed Joyce’s analysis on this point – not the phantasies of a redeeming final struggle aspect of Marxism so much as its class analysis. What gives peasants in some places substantial power and wealth, while others a lower status than even the dogs of a local potentate’s guards (p.196)? Joyce does at least supply the answer – secure and untrammelled access to sufficient land. The big political question for the future as I see it is how to generate and retain such access widely across society.
Only a little more Marxism, though. Joyce nicely points out that the manual working class – the ‘elemental man’ of the classical Marxist imagination – came to an end in Europe at the same time as the peasant. The ending was ugly in both cases, but politics for the future needs to embrace the fact. No more elemental men or authentic revolutionary classes. The future will be written by us, all of us, we non-elemental and inauthentic people, who have somehow remained.
Dialling back to the wider collective institutions of peasant society I mentioned earlier, those institutions are for the most part – Joyce tells us – ultra-conservative. I think this is basically right, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. There is, for one thing, a collectivism, an egalitarianism and a dislike of capitalism and the crudely monetary within peasant cultures that can excite the modern leftwing thinker. Still, this undoubtedly runs aground on a strong tide of peasant conservatism. Gender relations, generational relations, ritualised decorum, politeness and taciturnity, the emphasis on proprietorship, self-mastery, devotionalism, and the restraint of the individual interior life, all run counter to the instincts of leftwing thought, and to modernist thought more generally.
Some of them run counter to my own instincts too – unsurprisingly, being the reluctant child of modernism that I am. But I’m interested in the extent to which these traits are functional for living multi-generationally in small communities, or whether the new agrarians will be able to brush them aside as mere remnants of outmoded thought. I hope to return to this theme in future writing.
A difficulty is that few of us nowadays have any experience of living fully within local agrarian communities. There’s too much economic and social flow, even for those who live all their lives on the small family farms where they were raised.
It’s possible to be justly thankful for that – I’m mindful of Raymond Williams’s words: “there is more real community in the modern village that at any period in the remembered past. The changes that came, through democratic development and through economic struggle, sweetened and purified an older order” (The Country and the City, p.195).
All the same, I appreciate the way Joyce avoids what his fellow historian E.P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity” by not jumping on that popular modern bandwagon that insists everything about the past was obviously worse than today. Joyce astutely observes that “the past asks more questions of us than we do of it”, noting the “radical otherness” of the past, the ways in which its people were not the same as us (p.277). Instead, he provides an accounting of what was also lost in the kind of changes Williams invokes, including certain kinds of community.
‘Community’ is a word much bandied about by politicians of both a left and right-wing bent nowadays. I don’t think either really understand the lived, ornery complexity of a functional local community. Maybe part of my own personal journey toward ‘the awkward class’ is how increasingly at odds I feel with both these modern political traditions and their problematic conceptions of community. Again, this is something I hope to explore further.
One path into that is ecstatic peasant religious healing cults like Tarantismo, which Joyce fascinatingly examines in terms of the tension between the interior psychic life of individual personhood and the collective constraint exerted by the local community on such individualism. The cult practice helps redress the psychic pain of the individuals who bear this tension (mostly women – gender issues in the agrarian localisms of the past and future being another important issue requiring attention).
People often say that our culture needs to be more collective and less individualistic, and I don’t disagree – but I believe we should be careful what we wish for, and be sure to build subtle cultural institutions that can deal with the inevitable tensions that arise in collective societies.
Peasants, says Joyce, do not think in terms of concepts like ‘nature’. Land is to be worked and cultivated – made cultural – which isn’t easy. “The wild as our sublime makes no sense to the peasant” (p.59).
There’s a lot to be learned from this way of thinking. Capitalist economics tells us that resources are scarce, while a common counterargument is that they’re only scarce because the capitalists monopolise them – if we shared them fairly, there’d be abundance for all. True enough, perhaps, but that abundance is mercurial, conflicted and not directed wholly beneficially at people. Yes, there’s endless fecundity and growth in the world, but also endless decay and death, endless weeds and crop predators, endless things that don’t go to plan. There’s a sophistication and brilliance to the way that festivals like carnival in peasant societies play culturally with this abundance-scarcity duality in ways that make our modernist solemnities on the topic seem clunky (I wrote about this here).
Perhaps peasant societies live out the biocentrism of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Fighting their corner like all the other plants and animals, peasants are ‘plain members and citizens of biotic communities’, not the godlike humans of romantic modernism floating above it and lost in raptures at the wonder of it all. I’m sure there are good ways of combining contemporary ecological knowledge, new technological innovations and time-honoured agrarian practice that can help us both appreciate nature holistically while rolling up our sleeves to make it yield our dinner. But most of what I’ve seen about the footprint of these different lifeways convinces me that multitudes of hard-nosed but energy-poor agrarians spread out across the landscape trying to turn it to account to feed and shelter their households will cause less damage to the natural world than multitudes of urban-capitalist consumers loving nature to death by opting for the latest supposedly land-sparing techno-fixes.
So while it’s no doubt true that we cannot go back and just ‘be’ peasants – not without a lot of painstaking cultural work, anyway – I nevertheless believe there are many ways in which peasants can be tutors to the present, and help us to anticipate an ecologically renewable agrarian future.
Yet in critical environmentalist circles today, when people extol the virtues of traditional lifeways, peasants don’t get much of a look in. All the talk is of indigenous peoples instead. No doubt there are good reasons for this, especially in places like the Americas with recent histories of colonial land theft and modern land degradation. But I wonder if something else is going on too. It’s easy to recuperate a ‘progressive’ political position around indigeneity – those who were colonized, brutalized and considered inferior turn out to have greater land wisdom than we descendants of the colonizers. And, politically, ‘we’ cannot be ‘them’, which safely distances us from indigeneity. It’s as if indigeneity, especially of the foraging and hunting variety, is another at-a-distance technology, not unlike alt-meat or nuclear energy. The forager and the scientist as the elemental people of a mature modernity, unlocking its mysteries to achieve progress on our behalf.
European peasantries, by contrast, don’t make quite such good progressive heroes. For one thing, there’s the conservatism that Joyce mentions. There’s also the historical weight of the peasant past – not something to progress toward in the aftermath of a racist colonialism, but something apparently to regress back to in the aftermath of an unsustainable capitalism. Cue the endless, tiresome remarks about bucolic fantasies and nostalgic romanticism aimed at we latter-day agrarians.
The truth, though, is that the land wisdom of peasants parallels the land wisdom of indigenous peoples. Both use low-input methods keyed to a renewable local human ecology, and both – as Joyce puts it – understand land to be a “social rather than an economic entity”, anchored by family and kinship, such that “reproduction as well as production comes into the picture” (p.23). Indeed, many indigenous people are peasants. They evince most of the peasant traits discussed by Joyce, including the conservatism often enough.
The land wisdom of peasants and indigenous people is ultimately the land wisdom we moderns have to learn, not by some magic process of technology transfer but by long cultural development, starting now. There are no shortcuts to it. To begin that learning, it wouldn’t hurt to drop the whole misplaced temporal topology of ‘going back’ and ‘moving forward’ as we try to learn how to be indigenous to place. No more elemental men – neither of the past, nor the future. But honour and respect to the dead.
Plenty of new work in prospect, then, to work through all that. But if you’re still interested in my older work on the theme of agrarian localism vs manufactured food, my podcast about it with Rachel Donald of Planet Critical is just out here.
Anthony Galluzzo. 2023. AGAINST THE VORTEX: ZARDOZ AND DEGROWTH UTOPIAS IN THE SEVENTIES AND TODAY (Zero Books).
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Just before reading this post I was listening to two podcasts.
One was on lemurs (…but hear me out), and their matriarch-dominant social systems. A theory about how this came to be is that the environment in Madagascar is highly variable, both in terms of seasonal extremes of rainfall and plant growth and in terms of variation from year to year. Populations where female lemurs were able to monopolise food consumption and to otherwise lead their communities survived better, in such variable conditions, than more male-dominated populations.
This seems pertinent to me given the climate instability we are seeing already. But I would want to agree that patriarchal dominance and strict gender roles in traditional societies are not always all they seem, and I wonder whether there is any correlation between variable climate conditions and matriarchy in human societies.
The other podcast (not yet finished) was on collapse and skills to learn now, and it made the point that not everyone needs to learn every skill, because humans live in communities and cooperate with one another. It strikes me that one lens with which to view “culture” is as a toolset for facilitating such cooperation.
Hmmm the pesantry fight back has started , I read today that in Germany you can download an app that scans the label of a product and tells you if their are bugs incorporated , macro food meets the awkward pesantry !
You can also read the ingredients list on the product, presumably.
Would crofters not also be considered UK peasants Chris?
Interesting topic (again!)
Chris wrote “we’re just small nodes among a multitude of multigenerational actors who are incrementally and experimentally building a new agrarian civilisation over the long-haul”.
Yes. As I’ve commented here before, I got somewhat stuck in the ‘doom and gloom’ until I looked beyond the fate of myself and the people I know, and took the longer view. The transition period to the inevitable small farm future will probably coalesce over several generations, beyond a single lifetime. It’s humbling.
My grandfather was a peasant who emigrated to America as a young man, and lived most of his life in a big city. Perhaps my grandchild will eventually move to the countryside and become a neo-peasant.
My grandfather’s brother remained on the land and passed it down to his son, who currently raises cattle there. The world seems to have run out of suitable new frontiers for those who won’t be inheriting land. Time for major land reform (and perhaps new types of Homestead Acts)?
“inevitable” in the comments field of this blog reminds me – yet again – of the power of echo-chambers. You’re all prophets that can see the future, right? Like Asimov’s Psychohistory – you’ve factored in every variable – dismissed every technology.
I find this kind of certainty in the Climate Denier echo-chambers and the Techno-Utopian Community. (The have an actual “Infinite growth on a finite planet” manifesto!)
I do not pretend to know the future.
I’m just fairly certain that most of the ‘inevitability’ in peak energy circles comes from a few sources – like the Michaux’s and old, out of date EROEI papers by Weissbach, etc. The idea that peak fossil fuels must inevitably mean ‘peak energy’ is a myth. That’s all I’m saying.
But here? It’s Magnified, a thousand fold, by a few factors.
1. The internet is so big and social media landscape moving SO fast that people rarely slow down to READ!
2. Their eyes are so busy scouring for the next big thing, they take as ‘fact’ that someone like Chris Smaje actually READ Simon Michaux’s ‘paper’. There’s not enough minerals! That ‘fact’ fits with their Doomer presuppositions (because, after all, why are they reading here?) It gets filed away and added to their ‘certainty’.
3. But stop and question a referenced paper like Michaux’s? As a recovering peak oiler, when I first heard this guy going on about a lack of minerals I immediately wondered if there was something in it? I HAD to know! Because I knew about how mining for minerals peaks, energy levels involved, and other issues like the difference between a resource and reserve. I’m not expert – but I know the story.
And at first? Michaux could have made sense – for all I knew. Mineral resources were the next big thing to check – and I’m amazed I didn’t check that a decade ago!
But others buying into the peak energy or doomer thing are just less likely inclined to bother cross-checking a ‘Degrowth hero’ like Michaux.
It makes you wonder what else certain echo-chamber communities have swallowed – hook, line and sinker?
“Inevitable” is my opinion (perhaps I should have added something like “IMHO” to make that clear), and is subject to change. I admit the uncertainties involved, unlike some boosters for the renewables transition. If someone has a different opinion, my sense of security isn’t somehow threatened.
Regarding mineral resources and related supply shortages potentially preventing the transition, my opinion is influenced by this paper, co-authored by 23 proponents for a renewable transition (from Europe, North America, and Australia). They admit there are uncertainties (including “a formidable challenge” as they describe it), and their conclusion is that it appears there is reason for only “moderate optimism” that mineral shortages won’t be an “unsurmountable roadblock”.
“All in all, there appears to be reason for moderate optimism that material criticalities will not represent an unsurmountable roadblock towards the transition to 100% RE systems. However, it is also clear that it will be a formidable challenge to ensure the timely availability of resources while simultaneously minimizing the negative impacts of extraction on humans and the environment.”
On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
A few days ago, we had friends helping burning branches in the forest we convert to a wooded pasture, One of them is a negotiator in the convention on biodiversity. She was irritated about the insistence (by the representatives of indigenous people as well by various progressives) on that indigenous people have unique insights in sustainability, including collective management of commons, while other “local communities” (wether historical or still alive) are seen as mostly exploitive and need to be regulated.
This latter view is very strong among many environmentalists that hail all sorts of EU regulations on environmental issues. They have, mostly, good intentions but in the end it disempower local communities and turn them inte enemies of environmental preservation in a similar way as people evicted from national parks turn into poachers….
They should look at West Texas , the indigenous people here were Comanche ,hated by just about everyone , they hunted the Caddo out , the few that were left joined up with the whites for safety , the Apache killed them on sight , they roamed from West of fort worth the way to new mexico , South from Oklahoma city to well into what is now Mexico , their ” indigenous “knowledge was to hunt and steal what the needed from every on else around , the only thing to learn from them is barbaric thuggery .
I am idly thinking about what sort of rents our peasant ancestors paid, and what sort they might pay in future.
Things like eel-rents seem strange to us, but were commonplace in mediaeval and early modern England (see https://historiacartarum.org/eel-rents-project/ forpre on this). But a broader question I have is around the use of a perishable foodstuff as a sort of currency. Yes, dried and salted eels would last quite a bit longer than fresh ones, but ultimately they have to be consumed before they spoil. They also aren’t trivial to store compared to hard currency (or the electronic numbers that make up.our bank accounts now).
I’ve wondered before about how climate instability might affect the economics of our current staple calorie crops (mostly grains), and how far that would need to be disrupted to change the balance of power away from a landed gentry that can extract rents in the form of self-stable cash crops. This is highly theoretical of course, but I also wonder whether maize-based agrarian societies in the Americas developed substantially different social structures than the wheat-based ones of the Old World, and if so, why.
Shelf-stable, not self-stable. Silly autocarrot.
This post made me think of my grandparents, Polish peasants from the 1920s. They were from a time before rural electrification and tractors. My grandma baked bread every day, could mend anything, made rugs from the rags, told me how, in the old country, they would kill a pig and salt it to preserve it for winter. My grandpa cut a garage full of firewood every year with a bucksaw and a sawbuck, raise pigeons to eat and taught me how to make wicker baskets. They both kept a garden and chickens. And probably a million other things that I never noticed or thought to ask about. Neither ever learned to drive a car.
Looking for information about ‘polish peasants 1920’ I came across
https://apcz.umk.pl/APH/article/download/42288/34617
It does not sound like they had a very easy life, probably due to reasons unrelated to agriculture. Tangentially the article mentions a people’s history of peasants, actual stories from their lives. I didn’t follow up to see how much they talked about techniques and culture but those histories could be a window into their lives.
Bad news Chris, you are going to have to write the book you want to read.
Thanks for the comments & sorry for my quietness re comments. Not finding a lot of time for it at the moment, though tbh I just wasted a bunch of time pointlessly arguing with someone on Twitter and am now feeling guilty for not responding to much wiser observations here.
Re Kathryn’s points on lemurs & shared skills, a classic way of sharing out skills in agrarian societies of course has been a gendered division of labour. Thoughts anyone? Regarding the lemurs, I’m interested in matriliny (not so much matriarchy … though maybe) as an agrarian strategy, and hope to write more about this. Regarding rents, yes v interesting. Grain, eels, Appalachian whisky – any other offers? A classic anti-peasant strategy is to insist instead on hard currency.
Jon – crofters. Perhaps at the back of my mind was the notion that the Welsh situation was more continuous, while crofting was more in the way of a peasant reinvention after extirpation. But since one of the main points of the post was to argue against the idea of the ‘authentic peasant’, yes – also crofters!
Steve – yes to land reform. Please send me your blueprints, everyone!
Indigeneity – thanks Gunnar, interesting story. Not so into your Comanche take, Diogenes – as Joyce might say ‘there are many stories’
Greg – yes you’re right no doubt. A lot of critical book reviews (perhaps including the whole of my ‘Saying NO…’ book) amount to saying ‘this is what I would have said if I’d been writing a book about that’). Which does lead to an obvious follow up…
What happens to hard currency rents if you can’t sell cash crops because the climate isn’t stable enough for grains, eel populations are fluctuating too much, more people start raising sheep and the price of wool crashes, or there isn’t any way to transport your bananas to global markets and nobody local needs to buy them?
Alternatively, what semi-durable agrarian products are likely to be available if there is a collapse in the current organisation/order of global currency markets?
I cannot pay my rent in eels, quails, honey, pickled beets or winter squash, but I do wonder if I might in the event of a sufficiently bad crash. I remember my landlord emailing me in spring 2020, saying if we ended up unable to make rent because of COVID not to be scared of getting evicted, we would work something out. I don’t think he meant eels, though. I think he meant some kind of interest-free loan or maybe a rent amnesty. He is a kind man and not a terrible landlord, though of course at the end of our arrangement he will own a spare house with substantial market value, for which we have covered over a decade of mortgage payments and maintenance costs, so there is still a basic inequality here.
(I should note here that I also don’t produce eels, quails or honey.)
My point being a great deal is made about indigenous peoples but there is a very dark side to them too .
I have photos of my great great grand father , buckets in hand him wearing smock and her wearing a pinafore going to milk the cows , trying to keep their clothes clean to cut down on washing .
There is a video on YT showing rural electrification around 1942 , electric light saved hours cleaning lamps , one of the first things bought was a washing machine , followed by a electric stove , all saved work for the woman of the house the farm seemed to get electric light in the barn and a well pump, worth watching if you can find it .
My wife’s four generations ago grand mother spent an afternoon reloading rifles as her husband and son fought off the Comanche , it is said that he was the one that first ploughed land in eastland county TX . She kept a diary all her life , it took three weeks to drive cattle to Fort Worth and bought a years supply of ” dry goods ” cloth to make clothes and boots , they took three wagons with eight mules each . A six week trip that can be done in five hours now . She had a hard life , eleven children eight of which survived (one killed in the confederate army at Gettysburg) and died at the age of ninety six . I wish I was as tough as her !
Sounds like the Comanche were upset about something. Any idea what it was about ?
They wouldn’t let them steal the horses though they killed three in spite .
About cash as rent/tax: In Wangari Maathai’s Memoirs one can read the following:
“When the British decided to collect revenue and finance local development, they did not want to be paid in goats. They wanted cash. They also wanted to create a labor force, but they did not want to force people to work. So they introduced an income tax for men in most parts of the country that could be paid only in the form of money. This created a cash-based rather than a livestock-based economy. Of course, the colonial government and the British settlers were the only ones with money in their hands. So the local people, especially men, were indirectly forced to work on settlers’ farms or in offices so they could earn money to pay taxes. “
Thanks for the review – I’m still working my way through the book having got sidetracked by The Peregrine.
On the neo-peasant future, this is well worth a look, from Waco, TX:
https://faircompanies.com/videos/ecovillage-settlers-living-off-land-craft-like-modern-amish/
Thanks Simon, I’ll take a look. Do you mean the J.A. Baker peregrine book? Great book!
That’s the one. I’ll have to get sidetracked by his only other book, The Hill of Summer, described by one reviewer as ‘similarly intense, but less death-y’. The same reviewer goes on to compare Baker’s writing to the Victorian nature writer/mystic Richard Jefferies, so the trail leads on…
A fascinating post Chris, with much to enjoy – I particularly liked your emphasis on the importance of remembrance while looking forwards. As ever I’m commenting mostly on areas where I would shift the emphasis though!
I haven’t read Joyce’s book, but I’ll admit to a certain wariness of books that frame themselves as elegies for a vanished past. Some historians seem oddly prone to them – the Anglophone archetype might be Peter Laslett’s ‘The World We Have Lost’, which came out of the new emphasis on social history or ‘history from below’ in mid-century Britain. That book is, in many ways, very good, and just as you say of Joyce, Laslett doesn’t romanticise the less idyllic aspects of society. But I worry that the emphasis on another ‘world’ and the idea of of persistent or ‘traditional’ characteristics can obscure the importance of historical contingency and considerable changes over time from the reader.
What does it actually mean to separate out peasant societies from the rest of society, or to suggest that they are very old? What is it that persisted across untold generations on them that doesn’t now persist in modern societies? Is this actually just a critique of the modernist drive for ceaseless remaking, and if so do we lose something by reaching for evidence of greater coherence in the pre-modern world?
These may or may not be pertinent criticisms of Joyce’s book – clearly I can’t say without reading it – but they’re anxieties I have around this sort of genre. As an example, take burying the dead. Remembrance and respect were not particular peasant attributes so much as simply aspects of Christian societies across Europe and beyond. The priest under whose auspices they were buried represented a connection with larger structures of religious governance into which local communities were tied. You mention that Joyce’s book focuses on Catholic Europe, and there may be a temptation to see these areas as less changeable than those affected by the tumults of the Protestant reformation, but in fact they were no less subject to wider processes of change. There is a sort of ahistorical timelessness that comes out of removing a society from its broader contexts – in fact, I’m not even sure when Joyce’s peasant societies existed – you don’t comment on the timeframe of the book.
On community and the left, you’re certainly right to highlight the discomfort a lot of Marxian writing has with peasants as a class (or perhaps not a class!) and rescuing the kulaks from communist critique is a necessary endeavour. But there’s surely also something to be learned from studying peasants who did capitalise their operations as well (the typical focus for such analysis is usually England, not Russia) and to think about where the bounds of ‘peasant culture’ are being drawn – is the ‘rich, capitalist-oriented peasant’ beyond the pale? Probably – it’s commonplace to assert that Britain is virtually denuded of peasants, but how can we characterise its many family farms, outside the rarefied air of Welsh and Scottish uplands? I’m not suggesting we start to call them peasants, but I’m interested in the point at which quite a malleable concept suddenly becomes rigid.
I think you’re right to highlight the ways in which many peasants cannot be repurposed as left-wing heroes, and I also share your suspicion of characterising them as ultra-conservative. Again, I’m not sure what is to be gained by presenting conservatism as a characteristic of peasant societies. They may rarely have risen together with great redemptive passion, but there are many ways in which peasants resisted the impositions of their social superiors, both legal and illegal (or perhaps extra-legal). The local manor court (or the Russian mir) as an organ of conflict resolution (sometimes perhaps conflict exaggeration – peasants could be as enthusiastically litigious as their cousins in the towns) and of administration of agrarian life (on lands both ‘several’ and common) can be viewed as an example of effective communal agrarian government without the need to lionise either its left-wing or right-wing credentials.
None of this is criticism really, so much as vaguely contrary thoughts, and ultimately I think you’re right about the possibilities of gaining much in Europe through consideration of past agrarian lifeways. I also think a case can be made for the importance of the history of attempts to gain or maintain ‘secure and untrammelled access to sufficient land’ across time, which would draw peasant communities into a more particularity narrative than is otherwise justified by a focus on their cultural attributes – a history that makes full recognition of the differences between such communities according to time and place.
Finally, I was struck by your reference to ‘self-mastery’ as a peasant characteristic. Could you expand on it? It seems to hint at the liberal modernist idea of self-possession, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you mean! Likewise, you distinguish between peasant ‘proprietorship’ and a peasant’s ‘imperviousness to short-term modern concepts of property and law’, which seems like a contradiction – could you expand?
(A p.s. on rents. As I’ve suggested on here in the past, rents are better seen as ritualised instruments of social control to maintain hierarchies, than as simple economic returns (although the latter aspect is not necessarily negligible, depending on the context). Pre-modern rents in kind were often funnelled towards big displays of conspicuous consumption, thereby reinforcing that social function and overcoming the problem of perishability. It’s certainly true to say that an insistence on cash rents was often destructive, but I think it should be seen as a continuation of the use of rent as a social control – it’s just that the form of that control is being altered. From a peasant’s point of view, fixed rents in kind allow them greater autonomy than variable cash rents, but in both cases the rent itself serves as a connection to those who want to exploit them.)
Good to see you here again, Andrew. I’ll try to address some of your points.
Interesting questions about the meaning of ‘old’ peasant cultures. For info, Joyce’s main source for this seems to be Norman Davies’s book ‘God’s Playground’, discussed on p.58 of his own book. We touched on this point a while back in my discussion of Bakhtin’s analysis of medieval carnivals, in which he also described European peasant culture as very old.
I don’t have any expertise on this myself, other than reading anthropologists like Levi-Strauss in my youth who again emphasized the antiquity of certain cultural elements. I suppose I’d say Bakhtin convinced me that the richness of Carnival culture around ideas of abundance & want is something that can only build up over a long period of time, and not something that can just be articulated intellectually over a few generations – maybe why modernist conceptions of progress are so feeble! Likewise with practical elements of farming & ecological knowledge and the concepts in language to apprehend them (I’ve just finished Carwyn Graves’s superb book ‘Tir’ about this from a Welsh perspective).
But of course it’s valid to ask ‘over how long a period of time?’ and to suggest that things will also have changed over the period. And possibly to suggest that it’s a displaced critique of modernity’s time problems (Joyce has a lot to say about this). Do we lose something by representing premodern times as more coherent? Possibly, yes. Again, drawing on people like Alasdair MacIntyre (and Carwyn) I’d say nevertheless there may be some truth to the distinction. But I’d be interested to hear more about what you think is lost.
Not sure I agree with you concerning burial & Christianity. I was thinking for example of pagan Scandinavian cultures, the Vikings, the swiddeners of Finland and more generally of ubiquitous ancestor cults worldwide. Again, I’m sure you’re right about the importance of change in the Catholic church, but Catholicism has been quite good at absorbing pre-Christian, polytheistic elements that preserve the meaning of long historic time (great & little tradition stuff), whereas it strikes me that Protestantism has problems with deep history.
Regarding definitions of peasants & capitalists, I’m mostly going to duck your question – way too much ink has been spilled on this, and it becomes impossible to answer once you abandon strongly realist social theory. But I do think there are interesting historical questions around how peasants become capitalists – generally I think by coercion through minority commercial elements, who until recently rarely had it all their way. More interesting to me is how might new post-modern peasantries form. I hope to look at this in more detail in the future. From my present interactions I’d say possibly out of the ferment of ideas typically possessed by people who are self-employed or produce materially much for themselves, who have some understanding of energy, ecology and the symbolic nature of money & the economy, and who might find themselves thrown together in future political circumstances.
I agree with you about the ‘example of effective communal agrarian government without the need to lionise either its left-wing or right-wing credentials’. I’m interested in any specific examples/references around such agrarian government that anybody might be kind enough to send my way.
Regarding self-mastery, maybe I’ll just quote from Joyce (p.62) “Self-mastery is essential to survival. The culture is one of control: of emotions, of mind, of body … [Self-mastery is about] fortitude. It denotes strength of spirit, mastery of self, a person who will not flinch or surrender. Even if one must work for another person, the job itself is to be respected …. There is also a respect for property, for one is only a temporary custodian of the home, of what land there is, and of the Earth itself. Personal property is unwillingly loaned by peasants…”
…and so on. Interested in thoughts. Not quite sure what you mean by modern self-possession, but I believe this is different.
Regarding proprietorship vs modern concepts of property & law, I think this is really just a moral economy point about customary and not necessarily formalised peasant property rights which are held to regardless of the actual laws of a modern/modernising country. Peasant conceptions of property vs juridical ones. Carwyn has some interesting Welsh examples about this in his book.
Regarding rent, I hope to pick up this discussion with you again in due course! I take your point that rent in kind or cash may not always be qualitatively different – although I think it can be, as per Gunnar’s example. While I agree that rents … or, to be more general, let us say prestations … might often usefully be viewed as ritualised instruments of social control to maintain hierarchies, I think that’s too narrow a definition to encompass everything they can be. Also, would you not say that salaries and profits also have an element of ‘ritualised instrument of social control’ to them? And if not wherein lies the difference?
But I do think there are interesting historical questions around how peasants become capitalists – generally I think by coercion through minority commercial elements, who until recently rarely had it all their way. More interesting to me is how might new post-modern peasantries form. I hope to look at this in more detail in the future. From my present interactions I’d say possibly out of the ferment of ideas typically possessed by people who are self-employed or produce materially much for themselves, who have some understanding of energy, ecology and the symbolic nature of money & the economy, and who might find themselves thrown together in future political circumstances.
I feel like it’s also partly a matter of threading the way between increased autonomy from coercive (currently crapitalist) systems via self-provisioning, and the “captured garden” scenario where the self-provisioning just makes us into cheaper workers who don’t have to be paid as much. This isn’t limited to self-provisioning, though: I am reminded of zero hours contracts and the expectation that an employer need not pay the employee all of their living expenses, because the worker can always start a “side hustle” of some sort (or, more likely, take two or three other zero-hours contracts). This is not to say that zero-hours or part-time work is always exploitative, but to acknowledge that it often can be. (One of my favoured solutions with zero-hours contracts is not only of minimum guaranteed hours, but a minimum monthly stipend or retainer, payable by the employer, for contracts below a certain number of hours, in order to compensate the employee for the time they cannot usefully put into other pursuits because they might need to work at short notice. If the employers cannot afford to run a business this way, then perhaps the employers are not running a viable business… but measures to put the risks of doing business onto capitalists rather than workers are unpopular these days.)
Thanks for this Chris. There’s an interesting tension around the ‘purposes’ of history here, which I continue to grapple with more generally. A lot of academic history is currently ‘historicism’ in form – basically, it claims that historical events can only be understood when put into their wider historical contexts. As no two contexts are ever the same, it becomes harder to identify continuities in history, and consequently the idea of ‘deep time’ is often viewed with suspicion.
I have a lot of sympathy with this – though clearly it’s professionally necessary sympathy to some extent! – but I’m also open to other kinds of engagement with the past. Pre-modern historians in Western Europe often viewed the past as a source of moral examples, as a collection of ‘teachable moments’, for example. Remembering the dead is interesting in this regard. Broad generalisations about the significance of ‘the ancestors’ are anathema to the historicist, because death in the past meant all sorts of different things to different people, which changed over time. And yet clearly none of us have direct access to the past – or rather we all have an empathic connection with aspects of the past, a feeling about the importance of what and who came before, and it would be arrogant of professional historians to police that.
What this suggests to me, though, is that the past in the present is a fluid swirling thing, with meaning constantly being renewed and challenged, and I see it as the ‘job’ of historians to at least flag up when engagement with the past is being funnelled into questionable present-day projects. So I remain wary of appeals to deep time, which can sometimes be used to validate the advantages of one group over another, as I’m sure you know. I also don’t accept that, just because certain ways of doing or thinking things have taken generations to develop, they are necessarily better or more worthy of respect than others. This comes out in the indigeneity example – clearly the landways of many indigenous people in the world right now are better than the wastelands impose upon them by our neo-colonial order, and their protection is also resistance against the persistent ravages of that order. But I think I come back into alignment with you again in thinking that, once the grip of that order weakens, it will be more important to look to the future than get bogged down in the past. But perhaps it’s easier for me to say that because I don’t feel as wounded by the past as others. The notion that the past cries out for justice in the present is a whole other conversation!
So I worry that the notion of ‘old’ peasant cultures will benefit some projects for the control of land over others – although clearly global peasantdom isn’t exactly in the ascendant right now. On that point, I’m struck by how your references to peasant characteristics are inherently resistive – local ideas of proprietorship over outside law and order, the hope of the self-employed over those more tightly committed or bound to the ‘symbolic’ global economy. Maybe the answer to my question (what’s to be gained by distinguishing the peasantry from wider society as a distinct ‘world’ with its own ‘culture’?) is that it helps frame landwork-based resistance to our current destructive moment – but that would be a rather historicist explanation! The advantage of that answer, at least in my mind, is that it reminds us that neo-peasants could be many things in the future, they don’t have to conform to a particular set of cultural attributes – I’m not a fan of Joyce’s ‘self mastery’, from what you’ve shown of it, for all the reasons you’d expect of me now, essentially that I see more promise and more flexibility in more explicitly communal approaches.
I fear I’ve overlooked several aspects of your response, but I’ll leave it there for now.
Interesting thoughts. Regarding history, I guess there’s always a tension between seeking patterns and characterising particularities – hopefully there may be sweet spots somewhere between Jared Diamond and the average doorstopping historical research monograph.
Regarding, deep time & tradition – yes I think it’s right for historians, or anyone, to expose the ways that such concepts are used to buttress contemporary political projects and/or exclusions. But surely the opposite is also true? So much of the current boosterism around manufactured food, for example, is based on ideas of its ‘disruptive’ character, and the likes of Monbiot frequently disparage agriculture on the grounds of its Neolithic origins, which for unstated reasons he seems to think intrinsically disqualify it from being taken seriously in the 21st century. As I see it, this is an exclusionary project aimed at boosting corporate monopoly and profit based on an (eco)modernist disdain for tradition. So again maybe it’s a matter of finding the sweet spot in thinking about the uses of time and history. IMO modernity has problems with the idea of tradition that in turn cause a lot of problems – which is not to gainsay your point that tradition itself is a tricky concept.
With those caveats, I think we agree that looking to the future rather than getting bogged down in the past is a good idea – hence my ‘yes and no’ answer to the question of what peasants have to teach. But then when we come on to the question of peasant self-mastery versus your preference for communal approaches, I wonder if actually there *is* something patterned & generalisable from the idea of self-mastery in peasant societies. Collective organisation requires a lot of time and work to function well, which are in short supply in low-energy societies – hence collective organisation where this is the efficient option in relation to critical limiting factors and not otherwise, the latter requiring practices of self-mastery. For my part, I’m less collectively oriented to agrarian work than I used to be before I had practical experience of it. Some might say that merely reflects modern individualism, which may be true in part, but when you look at the elaborate efforts to mitigate free-riding and other individualist traits in non-modern societies, I think it’s hard to sustain the view that it’s only a modern problem. A lesson from history?
How about drawing a line between collective and cooperative in a SFF ? Is it simply a matter of the size of the land ?
I can’t see any reason for everyone to have a loom or a mill grind a crop of wheat. Having many hands to help harvest and thresh the wheat would be a good thing, even if everybody grows it.
Yes for sure, these are the kind of often quite complicated mixed arrangements that past agrarian societies developed and I think we can learn from. People grow their own wheat, but it’s milled cooperatively, then probably sold individually, but with collective agreements about sale to prevent price-fixing etc. It’s worth looking at how such arrangements develop, what kind of problems they’re trying to solve by adopting the specific individual/cooperative aspects of the chain, how the tradition may disproportionately benefit some kinds of people, and how reform of the tradition may disproportionately benefit others.
I see the collective/cooperative/ commoning flowing from the self mastery and in a constant toing and froing of skills and partnerships. The extent or distribution will surely emerge from the needs of the individuals, human and more than human, in the given bioregion.
Coming from a phenomenological perspective, an embodied knowledge, learning haptically through relationship with material (making stuff we need!) – the ancestors are literally passing down the skills (or not!). We are left as we were, able to work it out or not – perhaps the peasant dissolves history into stories that hold skills, because History is a tool of enclosure.
I like the defintion of the peasant as upholding an earth right, or natural law, and toiling away through whatever is at hand to restore and establish that law over time from deep to the present, unbroken. This answers something of Joe’s question below, how do we hold to the distributed right of access? It is in fibre and bones of the human animal.
I’ve long enjoyed the different perspectives and writing styles of commenters on this blog, and I’m loving this little sub-conversation! Thanks Andrew, Kathryn, Greg and Joel – I agree with everything everyone’s said, even though not all of it is completely compatible, and I like your different ways of saying it! Thanks Joel for your rich and soulful contribution here. Anyone want to make the next move?
Okay, maybe me. I think there’s scope for variation around the individual/collective duality. We all need to interact with others, but some people prefer more collective forms of work, others less so. I don’t want to build future scenarios which assume people are just inherently individualist or collectivist…
I think agrarian co-operative efforts extend into what we think of as modern or industrial farming, too, and global markets; I am thinking again of the logos for various wheat pools painted on the sides of the wooden grain elevators I grew up looking at. The farming was monoculture extractive machinery, real soil-destroying stuff, but the farmers still found some power in collective bargaining.
Those wooden elevators, previously cooperatively owned and operated, are mostly destroyed now, replaced by cement behemoths owned by corporations. I think it was Cargill that finally broke the wheat pools. They are set up for semitrailer trucks, not trains; the story of a corporation disrupting the cooperative efforts of the farmers is also the story of automobiles displacing railways.
I wonder if there is a history here that parallels the history of factory unionism. The Canadian prairies were (against the advice of Palliser, in my understanding) essentially treated as a giant grain factory. They still are, really; the topsoil situation is managed better now than it once was but we are still talking about fields eventually becoming too damaged to grow anything at all.
Clearly, then, collective or cooperative management is not enough, in and of itself, to protect land from the ravages of global market demand. Neither is having relatively small farms. A fully unionised paper mill can still dump dioxin into the water supply; unionised mines still contaminated the ground with cadmium or whatever else.
So I will go out on a limb and say that collective or cooperative arrangements are necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure a congdnial small farm future. We cannot mend our world without mending the economic system in which we exist, but I suspect that most examples of cooperative or collective arrangements in the last several hundred years exist to protect people from the worst effects of extractive global markets, rather than to create the Eden our hearts yearn for.
Would the wheat pools have survived better of their size was limited? (There was a long period of consolidation of the previously geographically-based pools before their eventually collapse.) Would Cargill have been able to take over if a certain percentage of farmers started producing only perishable and semi-perishable food for local markets instead of cash crop grains and pulses? Would the pulp and paper mill in the town where my mother spent part of her childhood have been less polluting if factories were worker-owned and limited to, say, 150 employee-owners? Well… maybe. We know now that topsoil erosion is a serious problem; we know now that dioxin causes cancer. But anyone who purchases land in the Canadian prairies today is still starting from depleted topsoil, and while no medic has pointed out that the aggressive breast cancer that killed my maternal grandmother (and less aggressive multiple cancers her three children have, so far, survived) may have been directly caused by living downstream of a pulp and paper mill, I certainly expect that to have changed my own risk profile despite never having lived therr myself. Not only can we not go back and run a different, less-damaging experiment, but the experiments we must now run are going to take place in the legacy left by our previous production models.
So: these ideas around alternate histories still don’t tell us all of what we need to do in the future. I tend toward thinking we need about a half billion small agricultural experiments (yes, that’s one for every sixteen people, and yes, I totally made that number up and actually think twelve is a good number of people/households working together), and the ones that work — and are not destroyed by global markets/crapitalism/corporations/technocratic modernism/whatever will become the refugia from which the rest of the world can learn to live better in the more volatile world we have inherited. I am still very much feeling my way towards what that might look like, but… in biology, refugia aren’t refugia if they have no protection from the fire/flood/volcano/whatever, either. They are microclimates that are a bit different from the surrounding area, where life can take refuge despite the surrounding catastrophe — but not (in my understanding) by extractive exploitation of it; and then when the crisis has passed, the life that survived in refuge renews and transforms the surrounding area.
Perhaps in trying to articulate what a future peasantry might look like we are putting the cart before the horse a bit. We know some, but not all, of the threats that lie ahead. What emerges next will depend very much on what the “new normal” is; what sort of physical context we are dealing with when a new equilibrium is reached. The small farm future with some access to vaccination, a bit of solar and wind power, and a low-energy peer-to-peer text-only internet is very different than the one without these things; building completely off-grid smallholdings (no industrial consumables whatsoever, no reliance on markets further than walking distance away, and absolutely nothing you can’t fix yourself with materials produced from on the farm) is many orders of magnitude harder, and might still be destroyed by fire or drought. The small farm future at 2°C of warming Is very different from that at 5°C of warming. Is it better, perhaps, to have some solar panels and some plastic water butts and prescription eyeglasses and to build twenty or thirty or a hundred times as many refugia, even though these also have vulnerabilities?
I think probably yes.
Is it better to make an attempt at cooperative or collective patterns of resource access, even though these also have vulnerabilities? I think probably yes.
So where I am getting to, I think, is that building local relationships of solidarity and cooperation must be part of how we build refugia. It cannot be all of how we build refugia, and there will necessarily be some vulnerability in what results.
If historic peasant ways had been completely devoid of vulnerability, we would still be living them. They were not. The hold-outs that exist may be due as much to luck as to brilliant governance or perfect defenses. Nothing we can build now will be guaranteed safe either; but business as usual is a guaranteed disaster, so there isn’t much to lose, here. But the more alternative governance models we have, the better the chances that one will strike the right balance of tedious meetings to good outcomes. The more small farms we have, all using slightly different approaches to obtaining a yield, the more chance that some of them will develop or rediscover a method of farming that works in that landscape and in the degree of climate volatility ahead. The more people are doing at least some self-provisioning, the less power the existing system of extraction has.
This seems to relate to the discussion with Steve below, who brings attention to Care Farms in relationship to the project we’re pursuing called Care Home Farm. The distinctions are the same as Kathryn defines, that the Care Farms are mostly tenant or family farms or gardens struggling to take place within the capitalist paradigm, relying on volunteer (read wealthy pensioner) support.
The great ideals of care farms, as in cooperatives, is lost in the superstructure of the rentier economy. If the peasant is anything it is the inalienable right of the human animal to the land, and this surely is the starting point for the Refugia, and it certainly is for our project.
How to get from land acquisition to rent free is another longer discussion but it is the ground from which the Care package begins. I agree with Kathryn again that this is a process of stepping down through available technologies but always with an eye on the what is the least that is needed for the most fun.
These experiments in what we are calling intersufficiency have to happen in a messy, one foot in, one foot out- but can also return some of the land assets through an intergenerational community that internalises the Care Home and (un)retirement homes, alongside families and communal living for young people. By providing food and shelter outside of the rent economy, the business’s (jobs, crafts) needed for provisioning thrive, and the tasks are shared (the largest of which is the Care home). The land is held in trust and we’re thinking about decision making models but are most interested in a coaching model – relating to the self mastery – for social cohesion.
We spoke to an architect on the weekend who is part of Regenerative Architecture and Architecture Declares and will be getting a funding propsal together by the end of the year. We will be talking to people from each industry, to codesign the spaces and it will be great to get your feed back here.
Thanks Kathryn for those two long & interesting sets of reflections, and Joel for more on your own project – I hope you’ll keep us informed about developments on that front.
In relation to Kathryn’s points, I don’t have much to say in response at the moment, but much food for thought there that no doubt I’ll come back to. One aspect of the demise of peasant societies has to do with the rise of high-energy, centralizing, nationalist modern state power. I see the emergence of future agrarian societies in the context of the fall of that kind of power, but I think the power will persist in all kinds of ways, and what comes after it won’t be exactly like what went before it, although it may have some resemblances.
Anyway, more on this soon no doubt!
@Chris
Sorry the comments are so long!
One aspect of the demise of peasant societies has to do with the rise of high-energy, centralizing, nationalist modern state power.
The Roman Catholic Church inherited a bunch of empire stuff from, well, Rome — another high-energy (for the time) centralising state power. That didn’t look like a modern nation-state, but it absolutely was extractive.
Another framing of the Reformation is as a process of emancipation from that central control. I’m not entirely convinced, partly because I think modern nation-states didn’t really start to take the shape we recognise today until a little later, in the Romantic era. (I’m also fairly liberal in my religious leanings, not in the sense of thinking that religion is largely about one’s inner, individual relationship with God, but rather in the sense of liberty — I am staunchly progressive or even permissive on a number of social questions, and I see a lot of current conservative religious posturing on such questions largely as a futile bid for power. But that is a whole other conversation.)
No need to apologise! This prompts what I think could be quite a fruitful line of enquiry about processes of peasantisation & de-peasantisation in premodern societies, which could be quite informative for future transitions. And also about political-religious ideologies. All pretty complex!
@Joel
I am loving the idea of the Care Home Farm.
I am slightly wary of many such enterprises, because of the way e.g. the Magdalen laundries turned out — nice little money-spinners for the institutions that ran them, absolutely horrific for those seeking asylum within them (or incarcerated against their will).
Do take extra care about your funding model.
Okay, I wrote a lot of this comment before writing the other one about refugia, so I’m posting it partly because I think it shows my working a bit and partly because it develops some of the ideas in a way I didn’t in the other comment.
Catholicism has been quite good at absorbing pre-Christian, polytheistic elements that preserve the meaning of long historic time (great & little tradition stuff), whereas it strikes me that Protestantism has problems with deep history.
I think I would say that the Reformation affected (or affects!) Roman Catholic and Protestant churches differently. This was not the first schism in the church, nor was it the first time that local practice diverged from a centralised magisterium. Gregorian chant, for example, was very much a top-down regularising thing, an attempt to unify (but which arguably bulldozed) diverse local chant traditions, many of which are now basically unknown. (I did some work a few years ago in association with a group working on the Old Hispanic Office — but as the manuscripts pre-date any chant notation we can read, it was very much a creative rather than interpretive effort; while there are some churches still using the Mozarabic Rite today, the music was largely lost when the Roman Rite and Gregorian Chant came into the area with the Reconquista. And there is an argument that the Mozarabic chant was, itself, written down as an attempt to standardise and formalise a confusing diversity of chant traditions…) Of course, many of these shifts were about alignment with secular or aristocratic power, and were accompanied by violence, which is not something that sits easily with my own interpretation of Christ’s teachings. (It’s not that “make a whip of cords and turn over some tables” isn’t an option; it’s that this is not, in any way, what the Catholic Church was doing during, say, the Inquisition.)
I have heard it asserted that one of the most difficult concepts about the Reformation and the Enlightenment for us moderns to get our heads around is the shift towards a much more individualistic stance. My understanding of the assertion is that the emergence of individual rights (e.g. to read and interpret Scripture), and concepts of individual, personal salvation rather than communal, were a huge change in a society that was previously more communalistic. I don’t know how true this is, or how much of e.g. enclosure it overlooks, but the spread of literacy, and reading information as somehting a person could do on a solitary basis (as opposed to older traditions of gathering for oral storytelling (slow), using art to depict events (very slow, potentially expensive!), or what I think of as “speech broadcast” where one literate person — a member of the clergy, perhaps, or a town crier — reads something to many people gathered together) does fit nicely with my own conceit about the Reformation being a phenomenon emergent from the technological (or material?) conditions of mass production of printed information and more widespread literacy, rather than being driven by Great Men With Great Ideas.
I’m not sure what that conception of the Reformation means for our own technological conditions of mass communication; some would say that what is emergent now is some kind of AI, but… it seems to me that most of what people call AI is really just three poorly-compiled databases in a trenchcoat. Instead, the patterns I see are more toward reduced reliance on words and increased integration of audio and visual media into people’s lives. My father and his girlfriend, when they aren’t in the same city, like to watch films together online. Online discussion groups spring up around popular podcasts, but there are a lot more pictures on the discord group (or whatever) than, say, in blog comments (or even blog posts) somewhere like here. And then there are the memes (in the internet sense of the word, not Dawkins’s thing about ideas, but pictures with humourous text on them) and the emoji and the plethora of short films now that huge numbers of people have smartphones which can trivially record such things. And I’m not even a Very Online person, there are probably things I’m missing entirely.
If culture is something that emerges from the forerunning technological or material conditions, it follows that a future peasant culture would need to emerge from… well, the paragraph above. That sounds implausible — how do we get from cat pictures and peach emoji to a robust and resilient agrarian localism? But while this intensification and acceleration of communications means we live in a very different context to that of former peasants, it also opens the door for all kinds of online community which, while not necessarily geographically bounded, does enjoy the fruits of very low-effort exchange of information. I’ve argued here before that rapid, widespread, two-way communication technology is not something that modern culture will let go of with open hands; I will now go further and say that online cross-pollination between disparate and disjunct agrarian localist experiments (refugia, if you like) is, on balance, a good thing for whatever culture emerges next. It is easier than it has ever been to write “I tried this in my context, it didn’t work very well, I think this is what went wrong, what worked for you?” on some or other online forum; the biggest problem is in trying to decide which forum to ask on and sorting through replies that are ignorant of context. It is also something of a hazard: an environment where views and clicks lead to profit does tend to favour the selling of easy wins as people who find they can’t actually support themselves with subsistence permaculture (or whatever) turn to supporting themselves by, er, selling courses on how to support yourself with subsistence permaculture (or whatever). But grifters gonna grift, and the presence of both outright scammers, and well-meaning advisors who misunderstand context, is not a new phenomenon that only arrived with internet access: it’s just a lot faster now.
A regular theme I bring up in comments here is that of diversity: diversity of crop species, diversity of crop varieties, diversity of planting locations, diversity of microclimates, diversity of skills… I’m going to go out on a limb here and point out that prior peasant cultures probably emerged during periods of relative climate stability. Yes, there would be crop failures from time to time (I’ve seen one year in five bandied about; I don’t remember where); floods and fires and tsunami all existed, as did volcanoes and earthquakes. But the reduced scale of, and reliance on, built infrastructure probably reduced the impact of some of these events, and by and large people weren’t dealing with things like berries boiling on the plants, or very large uncontrolled fires. That relative climate stability probably meant that, while local diversity was still helpful, it was basically okay to look at how your mother and your grandmother made cheese (or stacked firewood or mended clothing or spun wool), and do it that way. The way things had “always” been done was actually a result of hundreds of years of iterative experimentation, though there was at least some slow exchange of materials (hence tomatoes brought to Italy, and European rabbits and dandelions to just about everywhere) and ideas. Diversity certainly existed, but in a general background of climate stability, change could be slow and careful. Not disrupting existing systems too much (and suffering the potential unexpected consequences) was probably more important than trying new ones in some cases.
With climate instability, I’m not sure we could be successful by that method, even in areas where traditional (i.e. indigenous) knowledge has been largely preserved. The context is just changing too fast, and too unpredictably. I can’t tell whether I should be planting avocado trees because the world is warming, or Siberian pea tree because AMOC is going to shut down. To get a good yield at the allotment I can’t plan for either flooding or drought but rather need systems that are set up to withstand both. We do not have time for a hundred years of iterative experimentation. We probably don’t have time for ten years of it. And because catastrophe is not equally distributed, any one of us might be less than a year away from some kind of major upheaval that would drop us into a situation where subsistence farming is our best bet for our immediate survival.
My point about previous peasant cultures emerging during relative climate stability doesn’t mean that peasants themselves, or their cultures, were static. There were famines and wars and plagues, and just because the peasantry wasn’t always written about in these contexts doesn’t mean they weren’t affected. Migration was certainly part of my own family history, along with quite a few deaths from what would today be minor infections. But… there’s a big difference between my grandfather’s parents moving with their nine children from a farm in the US to a farm in Saskatchewan (my grandfather was nearly left behind on the train), or my great great grandmother ending up in race to stake a claim on land that had a natural spring (because she was the lightest, so the horse could go fastest; nevertheless, she lost, and they did not get the land with the spring), and anyone who lives in a city today having to figure out how to grow their own food. We like to think of ourselves as adaptable, because the pace of life seems so fast to us, but one only needs to observe the speed with which people fought to get “back to normal” during an active pandemic to realise that our own habits and culture, though fickle, can be just as conservative, just as slow-moving and insular, as that of our peasant ancestors. Additionally I would say that, especially under stress, we have the same tendencies to try to identify ourselves with a particular group.
I write of culture as emerging rather than being planned; but perhaps that’s another way of saying that in a thousand tiny cultural experiments, some of them catch on and are replicated, and others don’t. Some habits or practices confer a survival advantage on their adherents, often as a group rather than individually. But one reason we must beware of a nostalgic privileging of the past is that our peasant ancestors operated under much different conditions than ours, and if we try to do the same things they did without a deep understanding of how those actions interact with the wider system, it might not work so well and might also cause serious harm.
Given the combination of climate instability, energy scarcity, and (currently) readily available information (and disinformation), then, what might we be able to say about what might emerge? What skills or qualities will people need to have a survival advantage, and how might an emerging culture nurture or transmit those skills and qualities? Is there a way for a number of different approaches (or cultures or whatever) to emerge simultaneously?
I can rattle off a list of skills, beyond the obvious ones of being able to produce your own food, fuel and fibre by skimming off energy and materials from the flows present in your immediate landscape. We’ll need good critical thinking skills: the ability to evaluate competing truth claims and toss out the ones that are untrue. We’ll need good cooperative skills, or at least the social mechanisms to encourage cooperation, because in energy scarcity we’ll need to work with our neighbours rather than just paying some money to burn some fossi fuels when we want to get something done. We’ll need the ability to respond quickly to changing conditions, whether or not we fully comprehend them. We might need our gardens to have a segment dedicated to crops that don’t “traditionally” do so well in our area but are likely to survive when our main staples don’t work out. But focusing on those skills, while it might be helpful on several levels, can’t guarantee that the culture which emerges will be fit for the conditions under which it must operate.
But cultures aren’t fixed in stone; they develop over time. So a refugia culture, whether emergent, prescribed or some combination of both, doesn’t have to be perfect, because it can and will undergo further development as conditions change. It just has to be good enough to allow people to survive, without making things any worse. Long-term. “allow people to survive” is also going to mean mending some of the damage we’ve done, and “without making things any worse” is actually a very tall order… so “good enough” is still quite a high bar. But my feeling is that purity cultures (which are, in some respects, a rather Protestant phenomenon) are unhelpful in moving forward, and instead we need a broad, messy and holistic diversity of approaches.
A huge advantage we have now, and might not always have, is comparatively easy access to all kinds of information about all kinds of small-scale food, fibre and fuel production. Chris, I don’t know if you’ve read A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller Jr., but it’s an excellent tale of a post-nuclear-disaster (…or post- some kind of disaster, anyway) society going rapid technological innovation based on some circuit diagrams that were carefully preserved by scribes without good comprehension of what they were depicting. Our current literate culture is not great at memorisation but it is also one that makes physical artefacts with relative ease; committing to oral transmission of the breadth of small farm techniques currently in development is probably too difficult a thing except for specialists, though in some ways the proliferation of podcasts on the topic is a potential path.
I have realised that, while printed matter is relatively heavy and expensive, on my bookshelves I have been gathering a sort of low-tech library of relevant material. John Seymour’s books on self-sufficiency are a classic of the genre, of course. Low Tech Magazine now has offline copies of that web project available to purchase, though I don’t have any yet (they are on a birthday wishlist). I enjoy Carol Deppe’s books on gardening as much for her sense of humour as the techniques therein. I have Pascal Baudar and Sandor Katz on wild fermentation, various herbal medicine books (though I am only slowly starting to get into this aspect of self-provisioning, and there is an awful lot of outright flimflam in the space), books on knots, books on foraging for mushrooms and plants relative to this area, a book on distillation which I’m probably never going to use because HMRC might have something to say about it, books on agroforestry and viticulture and mycoculture and mending techniques. There are also a lot of books of poetry, theology, pastoral communication, several hymnals, lots of sheet music for various instruments and voices, and science fiction. But… if someone discovered the house we currently rent, abandoned, they would find quite a lot of potentially useful information, as well as some tools. Even the Reader’s Digest books on sewing, knitting, and gardening that Past Me bought from charity shops aren’t completely without merit.
No amount of book-knowledge can take the place of the in-depth experience that comes from long practice of skills, of course. So I would like to propose a multi-pronged approach, available to almost anyone who wants to participate:
1. Curate a sort of capsule collection of information that you think might be useful for future would-be peasants who aren’t sure where to start. This could be a shelf of books; it could be a collection of podcasts downloaded onto a USB stick; it could be a YouTube playlist, though I have some concerns about the longevity of that particular avenue. Be a little more intentional about it than I’ve been, and consider adding resources relevant to climates or biomes adjacent to your own, because those things are moving around some. For bonus points, write a short summary of the useful points in each resource, and tuck it into the front of the book. Your choices will be different than my choices; this is a feature, not a bug. Maybe you happen to read a lot of ethnobotany papers in your spare time or something, or maybe you’re into small-scale knife-making techniques, or maybe you just really appreciate the utility of a good pair of shoes and you have some books on historical and modern cobbler techniques.
2. Choose one (1) element of self-provisioning that you’re interested in and think you might enjoy, and start practising it as an intentionally productive hobby. If you’re a social sort of person it might be worth getting someone else local who’s also interested in that hobby involved; if you’re an introvert you can do it on your own. This might mean going on foraging walks with friends, or it might mean growing some greens on a windowsill, or it might mean starting a mending group, or spending half an hour in the evening twice a week working on your whittling, or baking sourdough once a week.
3. Share the results of this endeavour with at least one other person, preferably locally. That might mean knitting someone a hat and scarf, or it might mean giving your surplus courgettes to anyone who doesn’t hide when they see you approaching with a basket of courgettes, or it might mean getting together with neighbours to share some wine you’ve made, or it might mean you whittle a new doorstop for your other neighbour. It might just mean a poetry night, do not overlook the importance of culture here! If you’re an introvert (like me) you don’t have to have a big gathering or anything, but the point is to build relationships and get used to sharing.
4. Review steps 1-3. What would change in your information capsule collection if key resources were no longer available? What would change in your productive hobby if you couldn’t drive or you couldn’t heat your home or you couldn’t get hold of industrially-made yarn or whatever? What would change in your community without those things? You don’t have to solve for *all* the future constraints, just pick one, and start doing things a bit differently. Purchase grain locally for your bread and grind it yourself, or support a local mill if you have one. Spin yarn from nettles. Save some seed for your windowsill greens rather than purchasing it from a big seed company.
5. Review steps 1-3 again. How is your information capsule doing? Would you change what’s in it based on what you’ve learned? Would you like to learn a different skill or deepen an existing one? What are the needs in your local community? Maybe people don’t need courgettes but they do need hot sauce; maybe everyone has a hat and scarf but people are getting through blankets like nobody’s business. Maybe you’re the weirdo who actually really likes sewing work gloves (something I will always need), or maybe a group of you are able to set up a mutual aid mental health wellbeing space, or maybe you’ve figured out a process for a bindweed-based plastic-like substance that I can make in my kitchen, doesn’t produce toxins, and biodegrades after eighteen months. (Hey, I can dream. Bindweed must be good for something!)
This all sounds like small beans given the scale of change that is upon us, but if a return to self-provisioning is really in our future, then getting on with doing it now seems like a good start, especially given the extent of the information resources to which we have access currently.
The big political question for the future as I see it is how to generate and retain such (land) access widely across society.
A big question indeed.
As long as there are modern cities, industrial agriculture will be required to keep food flowing into them. And as long as there is industrial agriculture, peasantry will always be a very minor factor in land use.
In short, modern cities have no use for peasants and since cities are where political power resides, politicians will never have an interest in promoting peasantry. I think widespread peasantry is going to have to self-organize after the collapse of modernity, with little in the way of “softening the blow” via re-ruralization in advance of collapse.
That said, I am very interested in your incisive conjectures about what the post-collapse agrarian world might look like and any tactics that might help a future agrarian society’s self-organization succeed. Please keep up the good work.
And good to see you here again too Joe!
“I think widespread peasantry is going to have to self-organize after the collapse of modernity, with little in the way of “softening the blow” via re-ruralization in advance of collapse.”
Regrettably, I fear that’s probably going to be true quite generally. Partly why I feel the need to keep yelling ‘Er, hello! We have a problem here!’ at the top of my voice. But unfortunately my voice isn’t very loud, and many who do hear it are apt to ridicule it along the lines of ‘cruel fantasies/movement for mass death’ kind of stuff.
That said, I think there may be examples of ruralisation, small resistances to the polis, grassroots material organising that could help soften the blow in at least some places. So, again, I’m keen to share and amplify those examples, and I’m interested to hear of any from people reading this.
Whether you have a garden plot, some chickens, and maybe a pig or a couple sheep you graze in the commons but not enough land to grow extra for money, or the same gardens , and animals with all the room to graze them you could ever want but so few people so far apart that you can’t get enough of anything to markets to make any money anyhow. Either way you are married to the ground and it provides but just enough to keep you going.
After a few seasons you get some confidence that you can keep food on the table. I have some confidence we can recreate subsistence agriculture mixed with local foraging in some sort of commons. I don’t know how to help those future ( or not yet started ) farmers.really except keeping good locally adapted seed and sharing it . Or planting long lived fruit and nut trees. Maybe thinking towards planting what can do OK without much maintenance and live a hundred plus years in more climate stressed conditions we currently live with.
Care packages.
Care packages; refugia.
Another aspect of this you might be able to do locally would include good on-site water management (whatever that means where you are), hauling water for livestock or irrigation is thirsty work. I can’t do much of the big water management stuff where I am, the patches of land are too small, so for me it’s about improving soil water retention so that neither flooding nor drought are as impactful as they once were.
I would also be interested in establishing a coppice woodlot. Firewood and charcoal are both jolly useful in a sudden collapse scenario, and trees are pretty good for soil retention too, and then there are things like nuts and fungi which can be high-value cash crops or can be stored for winter (depending on the fungi; I’ve dried them simply by slicing them and hanging them outside on a sunny day). I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it’s easier to rehabilitate an abandoned (or just haphazardly-managed) hazel and chestnut coppice than to start a woodlot from scratch, so establishing those things now even if you’re not 100% sure you can maintain them well is better than not.
There are “soft skills” things that are useful, too: conflict mediation, how to manage communal decision-making (and thus communal governance of resources), building the habits of gathering and celebration that form the basis for community ties. A mixture of things like formal study of facilitation, mediation and pastoral skills, and things like never taking the car for a journey you could walk or cycle (so you see more people and stop and chat) or even going for a walk at dog-walk o’clock every day would be worthwhile even for people who don’t have access to land and gardens.
Chris wrote: “More interesting to me is how might new post-modern peasantries form…”
Looking beyond some isolated post-modern peasantries to the potentials for better achieving a widespread and convivial small farm future, I imagine there would be enough material to easily fill a book. Such a book could be regularly updated with more real-world examples as they evolve, to further inform and inspire more peasantry/ small farm movements.
And who better to write such an important book than a sociologist/ farmer/ author like Chris? (I’m not presuming anything, though, these are just preliminary ideas I’m brainstorming.) Here’s a rough outline of the type of book I’m imagining (in four parts):
The book could start with case studies to learn from, such as these (off the top of my head, in no particular order):
1. Brazil’s landless farmers movement, with successes resulting from occupation of the land and local political work, but when laws about commons weren’t enforced, there was encroachment from wealthy landowners…
2. Afghanistan (with 80%? of population being rural, mostly small farmers), when war stopped, some warlords expanded their land holdings, had serfs growing crops.
3. Some back-to-the-land movements in the US, (such as a prominent one from France in the 19th century) and why they eventually failed.
4. Homestead acts (19th century US), essentially government land giveaways with conditions
5. Eastern Europe, Romania, after fall of communism, farm collectives were parcelled out to families in the villages, became private property.
6. Cuba dealing with food shortages during the “special period”.
7. Food problems at Biosphere 2, and how technological plans which look good “on paper” can fail catastrophically due to something which wasn’t considered.
8, 9, 10… Various examples of land reform, and what can be learned about the different approaches.
These examples obviously have different contexts than most present-day situations, but with some sociological analysis and commentary (in Part 2 of the book), perhaps some patterns could be recognized and some insights could be gleaned about what to strive for, what to be careful with, and what to avoid. Such as, how things might turn out if centralized control decreases, compared to how things could go if it increases.
Allowing centralised control to increase (for example, with a Central Bank Digital Currency CBDC, increased surveillance, reduction in civil rights) will presumably result in a different looking SFF than if the real political power moves to the local level such that a centrally-planned and controlled food production economy wouldn’t be able to get off the ground no matter how hard the remote bureaucrats pushed for it.
Part 3 of the book could be more of a guide and a call to action, of what can be done now to increase the odds/chances of a convivial SFF.
For example, at the political level, a convivial SFF is a more likely outcome if we:
1. maintain the use of cash and politically oppose CBDC adoption
2. oppose increased surveillance
3. oppose reductions in civil rights (rights to assemble, protest, etc.), and by extension, the rights to grow one’s own food.
4. support more local governance (devolution, and states’ rights instead of federal control), not centralized control and globalization.
6. take steps to support the political changes needed for land reform
7. etc., etc.
With other examples at the personal level (financial wealth vs skills and social capital), and at the neighborhood level (cooperation between households, shared ownership, commons), etc.
Part 4 of the book could be devoted to present-day examples of people and communities working toward new peasant/ small farm economies and lifeways, highlighting their successes and challenges.
Again, this is just some spur-of-the-moment brainstorming in response to my concerns that the inevitable Small Farm Future might not be so convivial unless we (and the generations that follow us) actively try to steer its evolution in that direction.
Sounds like that book could be written by a certain Steve!
For present-day examples (involving money) I found this pdf encouraging – it’s a few years old now (2018) but compares small farms (10 acres or less, though most are on around a hectare or less, from memory). What stuck in the mind was how the seed-selling business was most profitable on paper (their seed collection is superb) and required the least land, in theory.
https://ecologicalland.coop/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Small_is_Successful_0.pdf
Detroit might be worth a look too, if we’re listing examples.
Rojava.
Russian “dachas” — summer/weekend homes where people traditionally keep extensive vegetable gardens — strike me as something with, at least, some potential; I hear a lot about hyperinflation and urban suffering in immediately post-Soviet Russia but less about whether those dacha gardens became suddenly more important
WWII victory gardens in the UK, maybe? I think that was the biggest sudden expansion of the allotment system, anyway.
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I might change “use cash” to “use a medium of exchange that will eventually spoil if you don’t use it”, given other discussions about rents and wealth.
“I hear a lot about hyperinflation and urban suffering in immediately post-Soviet Russia but less about whether those dacha gardens became suddenly more important”
Dmitri Orlov had some comments on this in Reinventing Collapse, based on his experiences travelling in and out of the former USSR during the 90s. He certainly considered the dachas one of the factors that mitigated hardship.
The other thing I took from that book was that the major increase in mortality during the Soviet collapse was in men in their 40s and 50s – in other words, not the most physically vulnerable (the very young and the very old), but those hit hardest by the collapse of structures of meaning, and not young enough to easily reorient to a different future.
Orlov went on some weird tangents later – I think the last time I checked his blog, he was into moon landing conspiracies – but that book has a lot of good anecdotal material for thinking about realities of collapse.
Thanks for this — I’m glad someone has at least looked at it.
I wonder if there is some survivorship bias in the comparatively low mortality in the older generations; people in their 40s and 50s during the early 1990s were essentially baby boomers, the next generation up would have fought in WWII.
I also wonder about mortality during the 1957 and 1968 ‘flu pandemics, and whether survivors of those ended up with increased deaths from cardiovascular disease.
Thanks Dougald – sorry missed your comment here. I’ll take a look!
Here’s a reminder from that “Small is Successful” paper (thanks, Simon), about a big obstacle to the formation of new post-modern peasantries in the UK, an obstacle which can be removed or bypassed if enough people get involved:
“…in the UK, 12 acres are required for a farm to qualify for permitted development rights”.
And a correction to last night’s bedtime rambling: I wrote that the Afghan warlords had “serfs” when I really meant “sharecroppers”.
My source is an FAO report (“Agriculture and Food Production in Post-war Afghanistan”) which I previously quoted in a comment, copied below. I found it interesting that the average farming household size there was 11.4 people, which reminds me of another potential obstacle to neo-peasantries, laws limiting the number of “unrelated” people living at one property (which can be used to prevent or break up intentional communities in the US, where in some areas the legal limit is only 3 people unrelated by blood, marriage, or adoption).
“Weak law enforcement”, mentioned below, can work both ways, allowing “trespassing” on otherwise unoccupied private property, and allowing private encroachment on public land.
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Regarding the potential effects of warlords on small farmers, and “how states orient themselves to low-wealth small-farm peripheries”, some parallels can be found in this 2003 FAO report from Afghanistan. Two major issues are water rights infringement and encroachment onto public grazing lands, which are also big issues in the American West (and related to recent armed “standoffs” on public lands there).
“The 2002-2003 crop season in Afghanistan was the first one planted and harvested in relative peace, after the end of a long period of domestic and international strife and political instability, and also the first one after the long drought that afflicted the country since 1999…”
“Four fifths of the Afghan population live in rural areas, and most are farmers or farm labourers… The farmer population lives in about 1.06 million farmer households with a mean size of 11.4 people.”
“Weak law enforcement and the emergence of local (big and small) warlords and “commanders” has led to water rights infringement in various areas… Another similar phenomenon is widespread encroaching of rain-fed cultivation on public grazing lands. While some of this is a piecemeal cultivation of small grazing fields by individual farmers, there are many cases of wholesale encroachment, usually by some local “commander” reclaiming grazing land as his private domain, and putting sharecroppers to grow crops on them. All in all, it is estimated that rain-fed cultivated land has been increased by about 15% in 2002-03 due to this encroachment factor…”
“In fact, some cases have been ascertained in which a single powerful landlord, usually a “commander”, has many sharecroppers cultivating land in his possession. This may be for instance the case in the wholesale appropriation and cultivation of grassland, or also for the cultivation of poppy (a sector where sharecroppers abound).”
Agriculture and Food Production in Post-war Afghanistan
Hector Maletta, Raphy Favre
Kabul, August 2003
http://www.fao.org/docrep/pdf/007/ae407e/ae407e00.pdf
What helped the food problem is that the Taliban banned poppy production , any field sown with popies was burned , if sown again the farmer was shot as a deterrant and the crop burned again .
Thanks for the interesting suggestions & comments.
I like the sound of your book suggestion Steve, though I’m not sure it’s quite the one I’m geared to write – hopefully someone else might! However, I will shamelessly plagiarise what I can from your contents list. My focus might be more on longer term cultural/human ecological change rather than shorter term political change, but there are overlaps worth exploring.
I’m still pondering the possibilities for a new book, so I remain open to suggested contents lists along the lines Steve has trailblazed!
Also thanks Kathryn & Bruce for your care package suggestions … important grist.
Simon, I’ve not read The Hill of Summer – hoping for your report! Regarding the ELC document you linked, I’ve been quite heavily involved with the ELC (though not so much recently) – a good organisation, fighting against long odds. The 12 acre criterion no longer exists in planning policy, but alas there are plenty of other obstacles to creating local small farm ecologies.
Also, going back to Andrew’s comment, I meant to remark on this:
“it’s commonplace to assert that Britain is virtually denuded of peasants, but how can we characterise its many family farms, outside the rarefied air of Welsh and Scottish uplands? I’m not suggesting we start to call them peasants, but I’m interested in the point at which quite a malleable concept suddenly becomes rigid.”
I’d be interested if Andrew, or anyone else, might care to expand on the issues involved here…
And also, Peter Laslett ‘The World We Have Lost’ – any further comments please! Any good recommendations on premodern kin structures & household economies from latterday Peter Lasletts?
Some interesting comments on this over on Resilience too.
I was thinking that, as an anthropologist, sociologist or historian, it must have been far easier (and helpful) to assign categories like peasant to describe a multitude of basically similar lifeways, when we were much less of a multitude. Would not an increasing weight of numbers in a population make terms like peasant less catch-all? Or as societies complexify, do people become more malleable in the way they live (necessarily or just generally)?
I’m reminded of the conversations on here way back, around Chris’s use of the term neo-peasant, which drew in many suggestions concerning its suitability – there were factions who preferred yeoman, others that favoured land worker, and so on. Maybe on the one hand people tend to like to ascribe themselves to a tribe with its rigid, fixed name that largely ticks the box to the sometimes confounding question, ‘what am I?’ or ‘what am I supposed to be again?’ It can help you know which way to turn when you go out the gate. On the other hand, rigidity doesn’t always fit and may even irk the subject: I’m a malleable creature, don’t fence me in. Language! Nouns! Categories! And yet how we need them! Consider the confusion that can ensue when things get fast and loose:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bXMRPVfXtFg
On a slight tangent, I’ve just come across this fella.
Might be of interest to you folks out there.
https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/
Kinda on the subject but not .
https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/05/germany-declares-broken-wind-turbines-to-be-listed-buildings/
Is this ancestor worship of a failed civilisation ?
Ostensibly about education, this is such a broad and fascinating discussion that encompasses a lot of what has been discussed and examined on SFF.
A lot of the answers might be ‘small farm future’, and the future does indeed figure large, especially future generations (and the ways they are being failed). It’s lengthy, but when I zoned out I found myself concentrating on the guy’s impressively animate Jack Nicholson eyebrows. Seriously, great talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFVoearUvP8
Alice is presently looking into turning our project of Care Home Farm into a PhD, so we can access research and councils and policy at the more local levels.
We’re thinking that leveraging the need for local authorities to cover care of the elderly, physical and mental health and educational services will begin to dovetail.
I’m always imagining a system like the County Farms where the boroughs of the cities have small holdings and farms for the people of that Borough. This becomes the beginning of the process of emptying out the city to allow for further green spaces, inner city farms and wildlife corridors to flow the other way, until a kind of equilibrium, homeostasis is found.
In a sense, the peasants self mastery never left. The jack of all trades, living by the skin of our teeth with just the clothes we’re stood up, we’re still toiling away, landless and in wage economy. It won’t take long.
I didn’t know about Care Farms, but a 2013 publication says there were 180 Care Farms operating in the UK.
https://www.farmgarden.org.uk/sites/farmgarden.org.uk/files/care_farming_key_facts.pdf
“Green care in agriculture or ‘care farming’ could offer a potential solution to address some of these issues. Care farming is defined as the use of commercial farms and agricultural landscapes as a base for promoting mental and physical health, through normal farming activity and is a growing movement to provide health, social or educational benefits through farming for a wide range of people. These may include those with defined medical or social needs (e.g. psychiatric patients, those suffering from mild to moderate depression, people with learning disabilities, those with a drug history, disaffected youth or elderly people) as well as those suffering from the effects of work-related stress or ill-health arising from obesity. Care farming is therefore a partnership between farmers, health and social care providers and participants.”
https://www.farmgarden.org.uk/sites/farmgarden.org.uk/files/care_farming_in_the_uk_final_report_jan_08.pdf
Thanks Steve! There’s also this from Junkaporta:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NPrR9n5JqgUuNA01jIwkL
He’s working with Aime and they are buying some land, some big ideas
Slightly off-topic for this post but the energy discussion that is popping up again has me thinking about extensive growth Vs intensive capacity.
I started with half an allotment plot in late 2019, took on another half plot within a few months when I realised I wanted to grow a lot of squashes, and then in late 2021 took on another half plot… 2022 saw me taking on an additional half plot on another site, further from home. I have four times as much allotment land as I started with, but I am probably only spending twice as much time.
The temptation is to think that if I want to increase my yields any further, I will need to take on even more land.
In fact, my yields have more than quadrupled in that time. Some of that is because fruit trees and asparagus plants are getting more established and so producing more. Some of it is that I use crop protection (mostly the greenhouse) and hot beds (mostly the compost heaps) for season extension. Some of it is that the soil is in better shape, so I lose less than I used to in situations of flooding and drought. Some of it is that I am composting a lot more than I did in the first year, having sortof talked my way into more coffee grounds than I can use (I remain a persistent carbon scavenger). Some of it is that I have learned some more of which varieties do well in my context, and which ones are really worth spending extra time and effort on..Some of it is just that my instincts and skills are better.
None of it is because the amount of solar energy reaching the land has increased.
Someday I will reach a point where the only way to increase my yields is to have access to even more land. I am nowhere near that stage yet. Looking around at other plots, I think very few allotments are at this stage. The reasons aren’t so much lack of skill but lack of time and lack of reward for growing more than you can eat, so people mostly do as much as they have time for and enjoy, and don’t try to maximise yield too much, especially on lower-cost staple crops. Not many people are aiming for seeing how many months of the year they can manage without purchasing any fruit (at least 7 for me, and it would be quite a bit longer if I gave up purchasing citrus, which I haven’t had much joy with growing), or growing soup peas and soup beans to eat over the winter (but they are so much tastier I can’t quite see myself going back). A few more are self-sufficient in tomatoes or garlic.
Neither extensive scaling up (taking on more and more land) or intensive scaling up (getting more and more yield from the same area) can continue forever, though. Extensive scaling will eventually hit a labour bottleneck; intensive scaling will eventually hit an insolation bottleneck. We have used industrial processes and fossil energy to escape the extensive scaling bottleneck, temporarily, such that it looks as if “agriculture takes up too much land” is the problem. We are nowhere near the insolation bottleneck for most industrially-farmed land.
With non-food solar energy, the extensive scaling bottleneck is “how many solar capture devices can we build and put in place?” and the intensive scaling bottleneck is “how efficiently do those devices convert sunlight to energy that we can use?”. I would like to make use of quite a bit more solar energy than I do — but I would like to do this in the form of a solar dehydrator, trombe walls, solar cooking facilities or maybe those tin can solar heating panels some people build. Photovoltaics are much more efficient today than even ten years ago, but… I feel like building extensive solar farms (putting a bunch of panels out in a field) when most rooftops still don’t have solar anything is kindof a mug’s game. Grabbing land for solar installations instead of using existing built infrastructure sortof rhymes with enclosure, even if there are precious few true commons left to enclose.
I assume there are similar dynamics with pumped hydro, dam-based hydro, wind turbines, and so on. Even wood biomass has extensive (cut down more forest) and intensive (coppice some of your existing forest) forms.
So I wonder whether part of a future peasant culture might involve a focus on intensive rather than extensive production. Perhaps this is just a re-phrasing of your point, Chris, about spread out over the landscape and tapping into energetic and material flows and cycles. It certainly dovetails with the necessary increase in muscle labour that happens when we stop moving around fossil fuels (energy captured a long time ago) or electricity (energy captured a long way away — unless you’ve got some production facilities handy) to escape the extensive cultivation bottleneck.
Meanwhile, I’m aware that I am somewhat overextended: in addition to the aforementioned allotment plots, I grow in the Soup Garden at church, the back garden at home, and a local community garden. So I find myself prioritising lower-effort crops that need less frequent attention. I will have more drying beans than fresh this year, and am experimenting in part of the Soup Garden with what I hope will become a self-sowing greens patch. The Soup Garden is an interesting example because it gets less sun than any of my other growing sites, but also because I try to have something to harvest every week — there were a lot of pea shoots last winter and I would like to branch out. But today will see the first harvest of radishes and mustard greens from the community garden, and the sowing of (more) beans and some cucurbits, before heading to the allotment to plant out aubergines (and sow still more beans).
The solar dehydrator I am happy with:
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2015/07/
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2015/10/solar-dehydrating-update.html
Unfortunately, the homesteaders I got the design from have left the web.
Thanks, Steve.
I think I want a chimney-style one, but I haven’t gotten around to building anything.
I do have lots of mesh bags I can hang in the greenhouse, and also a many-tiered cloth dehydrator that hangs from the washing line. Neither of these are great for very wet things but they’re quite good for drying off soup peas or radish pods or whatever, and they have the advantage of taking up very little storage space, which is important in my context.
Cars make great dehydrators , our trays behind the windscreen crack 2 windows and park in the sun , it takes 2_days to dry trays of peaches in my pickup .
I don’t have a car! But in a really dire scenario I suppose there might be some lying around.
The Wayback Machine still has that solar food drying information:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200222145336/http://www.geopathfinder.com/Solar-Food-Drying.html
How big is an allotment ?
Eight square rods in London; elsewhere sometimes ten.
When I worked it out, my various allotment plots plus back garden add up to around a tenth of an acre. But that includes sheds and pathways; the actual growing area is a bit smaller.
(The Far Allotment isn’t as large, more like a quarter plot than a full half, and the back garden is about the size of a half plot but is also half full of non-edible perennials I didn’t choose, storage for bicycles, and so on.)
@Chris
On a slight tangent.
Chris, are you aware/come across these guys?
Not a million miles away from you.
https://www.plotgatecommunityfarm.org/
Yep, I’m in contact with them. Also Charles Dowding, another local grower you mentioned who’s making waves in the world of horticulture!
Throw in Tinker’s Bubble as well and sunny Somerset seems to be a hotbed of horticultural experimentation.
I’ve just bought Charles Dodwding’s book, No Dig.
I wonder if it’s as easy as he portrays it?
I thought I’d already responded to this comment but it looks like the internet ate it…
“No dig” — works reasonably well in my experience if (and only if)
a) you get good at making compost (or can spend a small fortune on someone else’s, but that feels like cheating to me)
b) you really keep on top of the weeding afterward. Also I don’t think it will really deal with bramble roots or dock, you probably want to dig those out first if you can.
c) if you can’t keep on top of the weeding you re-apply a thick enough layer of compost that it doesn’t matter, frequently enough to smother the weeds; this is easiest if you’re growing things that mature quickly, though.
I tend toward low dig or low till rather than strictly no dig, because a lot of the food I grow is stuff that thrives on disturbed soil. It doesn’t matter whether “disturbed” means “I just dumped a load of compost there” or “I dug everything up”; the latter is much harder work and will have more weed seeds, though, as well as disrupting rather than feeding some of the soil microbiology, and if you’re removing nutrition in the form of food then you need to add some back anyway, so I only do a general “dig the bed over” sort of thing if I think the soil is badly compacted (and even then… the bit of the Soup Garden that mostly has dock and other taprooted weeds, I’m just making beds on top and dumping half-finished compost on them, because the churchyard is basically full of rubble from the old church building and digging is only useful if you happen to need bricks.)
I think Plotgate Community Farm have an event on this weekend. I might go along if it’s not tickets only.
John, some relevant points to ponder from a post several years ago.
https://chrissmaje.com/2016/05/the-revolution-will-not-be-market-gardenized-some-thoughts-on-jean-martin-fortier/
Thanks Simon, I’d forgotten about that classic!
@Simon H
Thanks for the link. All interesting stuff.
Im definitely not playing with the idea of making a living out of market gardening/horticulture.
I think perhaps, the only way to make a living from it is to write a book about it!!!!!!!
The no dig/compost idea has tweaked my imagination though.
Does it actually work in practice?
How could it fit in with biochar?
Terra Petra?
Humanure compost?
All stuff I would like to play around with.
Problem I have is persuading my partner to give over some of “her ornamental garden” to my follies.
The politics of a SFF can come down to just two people !!!!!!
Small victories. I’m building my compost bin from pallets, later today!!!!!
I’d say yes, no dig works in practice, especially on small scales. But as with most things it has its pros and cons, and the problem is when things are over-hyped or presented as panaceas. Adding compost is the big thing, and the more that you can do that endogenously in your growing system the more plausible the approach becomes – so definitely yes to humanure & biochar (though the provenance of the substrate for those is obviously significant).
The agricultural historian Joan Thirsk discussed in one of her books arguments over the virtues of till vs no till gardens dating back to the 17th century … so I think this argument is set to run on!
I like the notion that the politics of a SFF can come down to just two people. Yes indeed. Hope to write a bit more about this soon.
@Chris
Can you elaborate on “(though the provenance of the substrate for those is obviously significant).” I’m not clear what you mean.
No Dig seems to chime with some of the stuff in One Straw Revolution. Leaving the soil intact and going again on top. I guess the One Straw Revolution says more about crop rotations and seasonal combinations than just no dig.
I live in an ex-council house with a 30′ garden. (I’ve never actually measured it). So whatever I do will be small scale.
And as mentioned above. Getting access to even a small part of it may prove difficult:)
Just flicked to the back of my copy of No Dig.
No mention of biochar!!!!
And less surprising, no mention of humanure 🙂 !!!
@John
My understanding is that biochar only becomes biochar when inoculated with nutrients and microbes. The easiest way to do this is probably to incorporate it into your compost heap. That’s what I do with my charcoal, when I manage to make any.
As for humanure… I think you definitely want to make sure your compost is getting hot enough before you start adding poo. Urine is quite a bit safer. I believe Cordelia Rowlatt has an online course on the subject.
My own experience with ramial wood chip compost piles is that they are quite prone to drying out once they get hot. At the allotment I have a few big plastic rubbish bins that I fill with woodchips, then top up with rainwater, and I try to let them soak for at least 24h before putting them on the heap, though of necessity I will also include layers of unsoaked woodchips. This helps a lot. I think some people use plastic covers and so on instead, but soaking works well for me.
You’ll need at least two pallets “bays” if you’re planning to turn your heap. Of course, if you have space and the sides are tied together rather than nailed, you can simply remove them, re-assemble them next to the heap, and turn it over into the new location. I usually use doubled over garden twine at the top and bottom of each pallet.
@John
“Can you elaborate on “(though the provenance of the substrate for those is obviously significant).” I’m not clear what you mean.”
Sorry, what I meant was that one of the criticisms of a lot of no-till systems is that they rely on the ‘ghost acres’ of imported compost, so they’re not really viable if you scale them up as a society-wide solution. Making humanure or biochar might bring you a step closer to a closed loop system, but might still involve importing wood or woodchip, leading to the same scale up problem. I don’t mean to be too purist about it – the problem is only when people make sustainability claims around this sort of thing without considering the scale-up impacts.
I guess solid humanure tends to be pretty rich but low in volume, so maybe not ideal for the main no-till compost strategy – possible perhaps on a very small scale. We use solid humanure as a high-fertility input for local spot-composting, while adding urine to woodchips imported from tree surgeons (so – not closed loop, although we do have a lot of urine from the community & the campsite) as the main soil-amending compost. We’re starting to experiment with making our own woodchip from our woodland (using a woodchipper – more imports!), though I don’t really know how it would scale in a small farm future situation. Here in the UK where tillage is less destructive than in many places, I think a no till garden with priority compost use and tilled/fallowed fields with a grass/livestock & row crop rotation is probably the way to go.
@Chris
I’ve found electric secateurs are a slow but viable way to make woodchips at the Soup Garden. Probably less embodied energy than a wood chipper, and they go for quite a long time on a single charge. I imagine that’s still not a large enough scale to work well in your context…
But I wonder whether doing something like making biochar out of e.g. hazel prunings might be a lower-labour way to process them into small pieces, which could then be mixed with humanure for composting purposes.
Probably the lowest-effort carbon source I can think of is dry leaves, but that is not without issues:
a) you need weather dry enough that the leaves are actually dry
b) collecting enough to be worth composting is a lot of time with a rake
c) dry leaves take up a lot of space if you aren’t using them all at once (and they are an excellent rodent bedding)
d) removing too many leaves from your woodlot will eventually impoverish the trees, presumably, and in the shorter-term might mean missing out on a harvest of fungi
e) if you are using the leaves for compost you can’t also use them as e.g. tree fodder
I guess that, like hazel coppicing, it might work on a rotational basis; but it’s definitely different to the leaves I use (which are swept off the pavements by the council and nicely bagged up for me to collect if I’m quick enough).
@Chris
Thanks for the clarification.
On learning about No Dig my biggest question was “where does the compost come from”?
The idea of importing compost kinda defeats the object, in my opinion. Not on a purist level of a “closed loop” but on a money one!!!!!
I guess the feasiblity, or not, of making enough compost for No Dig mulching, depends on how much veg you are growing. If it’s for personal/family/friends consumption only, then it is more likely.
If veg (nutrients) are going “off farm” to strangers, then those nutrients will need to be replaced from somewhere. (Unless you run a veg/poo exchange/return scheme :)!!!!! )
We generate a lot of “garden waste” from the ornamental garden that we have. It will be interesting to see how much compost it produces.
My general thinking on a SFF, is very much about how to create “closed loops”.
Our modern lives are full of “imports”. Fossil fuels being the “daddy” of all “imports”. No one is producing food without them.
But…….we did have “closed loops” in the past and we will need to figure them out again in the future. Without them nothing is sustainable and debating how we organise collectively is pointless if we can’t first figure out “closed loop” systems.
On wood chips……. Can a chipper be rigged up to a static bicycle? Again, more “imports” but all tools other than hand tools are “imports”.
My interest in biochar is that it’s relatively easy to source, make and process down. Easier than chipping wood, with less tools.
Can it provide mulch cover and if so, would it be good or bad practice for a veg patch? Plus biochar for water purification is a future interesting project.
(Sorry, I don’t seem to be able to scroll back up this post to re-read and edit!!!???)
@John
A poo exchange might not be popular but you could probably ask friends and family for their compostable food waste. If you’re running short of carbon, asking them for shredded paper and recyclable cardboard wouldn’t be terrible either. Note that if you’re using food waste you want to be very much on top of rat populations.
I think it’s useful to differentiate between what I’ll call “de novo” imports, and waste streams from stuff that people are importing anyway, with the caveat that the latter are not necessarily reliable longer-term. The woodchips that I use won’t be easy to come by in a post-fossil world, and probably neither will the spent coffee grounds, but both of these are resources I don’t pay for (I even know people who charge businesses to pick up coffee grounds), and would otherwise still need to be used for something — or dumped in landfill.
A certain amount of moving nutrition around is probably necessary for most of the annual plants we use as calorie crops: they are descended, largely, from annual weeds that thrive on the nutrient availability and aerobic microbiome of recently-disturbed soil (from fires, floods, earthquakes, animals digging etc). A shift to perennial tree crops as high-calorie staples is tempting but not straightforward; but chestnut trees, for example, take several years to start bearing nuts and then you’ve got to compete with the squirrels and those wormy critters for the results; I think perennial calories crops are probably an important diversification in mixed farming but I don’t see chestnuts or hazelnuts replacing wheat or potatoes so much as providing animal fodder and coppiced wood for fuel (and biochar, and maybe some composting), with a secondary crop of nuts in good years.
Looks like this topic is running out of replies.
Nutrient cycling is the issue in a sustainable system. You can capture some of the basics on your own. Nitrogen and carbon are free for the taking with the right crops. Organic matter comes with them. Buckwheat seems to be able to access soil bound phosphorus. Wood ashes contain potassium.
Rebuilding soils is hard. Maintaining them is not so difficult if you are not losing a lot to leaching. Biochar and plain organic matter helps with that on soils without a lot of (or any) clay. Recycling humanure makes sense especially if you are not exporting any crops off the farm. What is difficult is that you need double or even three times your growing space for a sustainable soil building rotation.
The problem (or maybe just another problem) with cities is that they dump all their nutrients in the river. Even if they didn’t municipal waste water systems are contaminated with hormones, chemicals, solvents and plastic trash.
@Kathryn
Regarding compost heaps, I’m planning to go down the Joseph Jenkins route minus the poo for now. I live in quite a built up are, so if anyone gets wind (literally) that I’m composting poo, I might get dobbed in to the environment agency and get publicly shamed.
The JJ technique involves not turning of the heap.
Just straw insulation all the way round and then digging a hole in the existing compost/heap and burying new material. Covering back over with compost and cover material.
Compost bin is ready to go, so that’s next Saturday sorted 🙂 . Can’t wait. Very exciting!!!!
Just measured my garden.
I was a bit out with the 30′ figure.
It’s actually 22 metres or 72′. by 10 meters or 32′
Surly enough space for a little veg patch in there somewhere???? 🙂
@Kathryn
Having just loaded up my compost bin and re-read The Humanure Handbook, I’m a bit concerned about rats!!!!!!!
I didn’t put any chicken wire in the bins before filling.
I’m hoping that by burying new material in the centre of the pile, the rats won’t go delving in there? Especially when the pile heats up. I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed and monitor the situation.
I wouldn’t say we are infested with the “little fellas”, but we do see the odd one scurrying around from time to time. (I’ve got a bit of a phobia for rats!!!!!)
I’ve been away for a couple of days, giving a couple of talks in Talgarth under the auspices of Black Mountains College – an interesting experience. I took the train to Abergavenny, then cycled the 25 miles or so up the Vale of Ewyas, close to the birthplace of Raymond Williams. I discovered that the top of Gospel Pass, part of my route, is in fact is the highest road in Wales, and my body is certainly corroborating this narrative today. So I need to recover for a day or two, catch up with some garden work and attend to a few other things. But I’ll hopefully be back here in a week or so with a new post.
I’ve told you before, Chris: the trick with hills is to cycle down them!
Cycling down was even more stressful!
The hill down to the allotment is one of the reasons I love my coaster brakes. (The downhill part of the way back is much gentler.)
Ha! I’ve done that over-the-gospel-pass route myself – but in the other direction.The long freewheel down to Abergavenny was really something. Most of the route *up* to the pass was a get-off-and-push job.
Biochar John!
If you search on youtube ‘Charles Dowding biochar’ you’ll find an interesting vid from a couple of years ago of Dowding trying out a small charcoal kiln at his Homeacres garden.
On an even smaller scale, I thought this old lady’s approach was novel and could work almost anywhere – just watch from the 4.45min mark for the neatest little solution for producing charcoal at home, using old seeds to boot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHHKSSjqnc
@Simon H
That’s another interesting kiln design. Need to watch it again and ponder.
I’ve made one of these
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=how+to+make+biochar+&&view=detail&mid=3E8E78EFC54EF4E62AAD3E8E78EFC54EF4E62AAD&rvsmid=5507A9B562A49A2FCE355507A9B562A49A2FCE35&FORM=VDRVRV&PC=XIBA&ssp=1&safesearch=moderate&setlang=en-gb&cc=GB
It makes lots of biochar but was a bit smokey if the conditions aren’t right.
No Dig was first written in 2022, so maybe Charles Dowding is a bit further down the line with biochar these days.
Biochar does actually get a one paragraph mention in No Dig having read a few pages.
Thanks John, I’ll give that a watch – looks like serious business!
On the subject of no dig, here’s a timely one from this morning’s On Your Farm, from Gloucs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001zdh8
Sorry John, that was the Dowding link – here’s the one I meant to send:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAaKB4T5mIg
@Simon H
Thanks for the link. What an amazing lady.
I’ve actually been making biochar in my wood burner the same way. I’ve got 3 stainless steel jars with push on lids. I fill them with dried twigs, nut shells and various other stuff.
The gases vent out of a small hole in the lids. (Sounds like a jet engine!!!!) and get ignited by the fire.
It works really well and I get heat and biochar at the same time.!
It works really
In the subject of wood burning …
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/05/15/drax-to-build-wood-power-cargo-ship/
Gasifier or steam it does not say and no mention of sail .
@Diogenese10
Hmmmmmm. Not sure that sounds like a good idea. The power station is on pretty dodgy “green” ground, never mind a cargo ship 🙂
Hi John,
There may be people around who will let you use their garden.
I have a very small garden at home, but use 2 other garden plots. The owner of one of them says that, to her, gardening is like outdoor housework, and is happy for me to use her front garden as my « allotment ». The other one is outside the village in easy cycling distance. The owner is not fit enough to manage it now, but is happy for me to use it. I give her some of the produce.
(Very interested in your work on rocket stoves. I’ve a DI Y version confined to the conservatory. Not acceptable in the living room!)
Frank
@Frank
Interesting idea.
My elderly neighbour no longer grows on her garden or uses he greenhouse.
(My rocket stove hasn’t made it into the house either:) Still a few modifications on it required. So many plans, so little time!!!)
@Chris
I went and paid a visit to Plotgate Community Farm over the weekend.
Had a good chat with Amy (at least I enjoyed the chat. I can say for definite Amy did 🙂 )
You came up in the conversation in passing.
Was an interesting place. Got lots of thoughts buzzing around in my head.
I think, trying to run a commercial farm in today’s world, is hard work and there are probably easier ways of making a living. Being “tied” to the farm, living in a “small geographical world” would be a major challenge for me. I take for granted the “freedom” to roam, that a van can provide.
Even, just driving to Plotgate to take a look and be home for tea, is a luxury that won’t exist in a SFF.
There is also the question of what next, when the present occupants become too old to work the land any more and their kids aren’t interested in taking it on.
But in a SFF, the dynamics would shift. The options will be limited. Farms would become intergenerational. Communities of like minded people, won’t be spread thinly around. It will be every neighbour in the same boat. But those “imports” of modernity that make life easier will become increasingly sparce.
A big concern for me would be the geographical isolation creating less expansive minds/thoughts.
I thrive on the communicating of ideas with others. My ideas/values/thoughts grow on places like this blog. The amount of people, one would come in contact with, in a SFF would limit the level of cross-fertilisation of ideas.
Going back to the earlier discussion on “imports” and “closed loops”. Am I right in thinking that, back in the day, closed loops were achieved by leaving land fallow and then ploughing in the cover crop?
No Dig not really being an option without the compost (at scale) being made and used as a mulch?
One of the discussions at Plotgate was about how much to use “imports” to increase production and reduce labour. A tractor for example. But then it puts pressure on sales in order to afford the “imports” in a money economy.
All interesting stuff.
That should read
“at least I enjoyed the chat. I can’t say for definite Amy did “
Closed loops involved things like leaving land fallow, yes, but also using animal manure — and human, too. My understanding is that before modern plumbing there were carts taking “night soil” from London to the market gardens of Essex, for example.
Hi John
Glad you had a good time at Plotgate and a good chat with Amy!
The advantage of a small farm future in which public sewerage no longer operates is that you won’t have to worry about what your neighbours think of humanure and go searching in the wilder reaches of the internet for information – your neighbours will develop a keen interest in the topic! In the longer term, it’s issues like this that I suspect will mean that people spread out a little in the landscape (i.e. deurbanise). I take your point about the narrowing of horizons involved in this. I’d argue that to some extent the ‘broadening’ of horizons in modern times has involved a loss of critical local knowledges, but nevertheless I’m all in favour of agrarian localism not being too inward-looking. Not every small farm society has been insular or uninterested in wider issues. The challenge is to keep the flow of thought going without the flow of capital and energy!
Regarding closed loop systems, yes fallow & tillage is the way to do it at scale. Moving manure around the system (farmyard manure, or night soil from cities, or the old sheep-corn systems historically practiced near here with the sheep brought from the extensive downs onto the intensive arable fields) can be a refinement of the system, but the nutrients in the manure ultimately come from somewhere, and – C, N & O excepted – will ultimately probably have to return to avoid depletion. Hence, domestic gardening with humanure composting represents a genuinely renewable closed loop system.
Our campsite toilets are a great source of nutrient input. I’d like to recommend that everyone runs a campsite to boost their garden productivity, but somehow I can’t make the numbers add up…
@Chris
On fallow and til, do you know if anyone in the UK has been able to achieve a system similar to Masanobu Fukuoka’s, but with say, wheat rather than rice? Not till involved and the waste from the last harvest nourishes the next crop.
Visiting Plotgate has made me think I might go on a tour of Somerset veg growers to broaden my horizons. Charles Dowding is one objective and another would be………Vallis Veg!
I’m playing the long game with the humanure compost. They all might be laughing at me now but…………….!!!!!!! 🙂
Just finished loading my first compost bin. Surprisingly easy and fun. Ordered my thermometer earlier, so all set. I might drop the odd poo in when no-one is looking. I’ve been weeing in a bucket full of crushed biochar to give the compost a bit of a “kick”. (The biochar really absorbes the smell of ammonia)
I guess that it’s the flow/sharing of new ideas in a SFF that concerns me. People getting stuck in “rutts of behaviour”. Social as well as practical.
One-straw John!
Here’s an interesting article pertaining to your wheat question, from the ever-excellent The Land Magazine:
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/continuous-grain-cropping
@Simon H
One straw indeed!
Thanks for the link. Looks like it might answer my query.
That my morning read to go with my morning coffee.
@Simon H
Read the article today over a nice coffee.
Wow!!!! Well worth the read. Really interesting stuff.
The line “Contrary to both popular and academic belief, any significant increase in fertility in a Medieval field in 1500 AD would have led to crop failure and starvation.” really stood out.
First I’ve ever heard of the concept of “lodging “.
Also the line “In terms of land use, organic farming in the UK is focussed on rearing animals rather than growing grain.”
Chris.
Do you have an opinion or further insights into Continuous Grain Cropping?
On face value, it seems like the direction of travel in a SFF if it actually works?
Yes, John is an interesting character. The difficulty with no-till continuous cropping systems of annual crops, especially in a climate like ours, is good establishment of the crop in the existing sward. It seems like John is able to do this somehow with his method, but he doesn’t explain how. I think the article is needlessly sniffy about mixed organic farming with livestock/ley & arable rotations but maybe that’s a discussion for another day. On a garden scale, it would be fun to experiment with John’s CGC system. Although most gardeners prefer to grow potatoes in rotation, with digging!
@Chris
Yes, the article doesn’t actually say how/when he sows the grain to grow the wheat.
But is wheat the best crop to grow in terms of nutrition anyway???
I read somewhere (probably on this site) that the UK should consider broad (fava) beans as an alternative to wheat. Fava beans, when dried, can then be milled to make flour.
With this in mind, I did by a packet of fava beans and grind them in my manual coffee grinder. It was quite a chore as it took three grinds at different “coarsenecces”, to get it down to a flour. I couldn’t find fava bean flour for love nor money. I just got strange looks at the wholefood stores.
It did work as a bread though. Quite different to wheat bread but still edible.
Maybe a little off topic but I have a plot of Red Fife wheat that is too small to be worth cleaning the combine out twice to harvest. Any recommendations on a good scythe ? I’d prefer one with a wooden snath. Wood feels better in my hands than metal, even if it is a bit heavier. A grain cradle would be a plus.
In these parts, Simon Fairlie has popularized the Austrian scythes with wooden snaths made by Schröckenfux: http://www.thescytheshop.co.uk/. I find them pretty good. Not sure if you can get grain cradles with them, though I’ve seen people improvising them quite easily. The scythe association publishes a newsletter ‘Windrow’ with lots of discussion about such things: https://scytheassociation.org/news/
I was surprised to see one of the Fux scythe blades available on Amazon.com, but I couldn’t find their wooden snath there – you could make or improvise your own from a branch, but the latest Fux snath, steam-bent from Ash, is really, really nice.
I still want to make a grain cradle for my electric strimmer… I’m sure it has been done!
This post reminds me that The Green Scythe Fair is on again on 9th June.
I’ve got my tickets!
How a year has flown by!!!!!!!!!
Greg, I don’t know if you live in the UK but lots of scythes and accessories are for sale at the fair .
For would-be scythers in the US, I’d recommend the ergonomic scythes sold by Scythe Works, One Scythe Revolution, and Lehmans. Other designs being sold commercially there aren’t so good. If you’re set on the “American style” scythe (too heavy and short for my liking), then BYXCO is the place to get that equipment and know-how.
I’m a fan of Scythe Works, which is in Canada (at the border) and ships to the US. (Because of the weaker Canadian dollar, their total costs can be less than US sellers, even with shipping factored in). Alexander Vido started Scythe Works as a way to raise funds for his scythe activism in developing countries, and he gives good attention to the equipment he sells.
Alexander designed the grain cradle he introduced to farmers in India, as shown being used in his video at this page:
https://scytheworks.ca/scythe-works-without-borders/
I called him today, and he said he has one of these cradles left which he will hold for Greg, if Greg wants to buy it along with a scythe. He said the cradle works best with a one-grip snath as shown in the India video (which he also has available in addition to 2-grip snaths, unlike other sellers), and the cradles usually need some final adjustments in the field to get the best results.
@Steve L
That’s a great video from India.
But did you see the size of the field?????!!!!!
How long must it have taken to cut with a sickle???!!!
Just a small off-topic musing:
I think people still expect change to happen suddenly, all at once, everywhere — rather than in a series of short localised shocks combined with incremental falling apart.
Whar I am seeing instead:
– “just in time” supply systems have not returned to pre-pandemic levels of functionality (which were, at least where I am, already not great). I don’t really notice this because I do not really base my household provisioning on just-in-time supply chains if I can help it, but my father, who splits his time between Canada and the US, is continually surprised when he goes to a grocery store and finds they are out of vinegar, say, or a certain type of tea.
– road maintenance locally is worse than it was ten years ago; there is a particular cycleway where the vegetation has nearly covered the path, forcing cyclists onto the pedestrian bit. Last year it got cut back part of the way. I can remember when it was cut back properly every year.
– shipping for items one might purchase online is much more expensive and less reliable than it used to be; I know complaining about the postal service is a national sport in most countries, but I have noticed people who regularly purchase things from the US via Etsy or similar finding that… no, USPS really does cost that much now even if all you’re buying is washi tape.
– the soup kitchen at my church is now feeding more people than it did during the height of the pandemic
– we operate a “fuel exchange” where people who don’t need their winter fuel rebate can donate it so we can top up electric and gas meters for soup kitchen guests; this winter, it ran out of money
All of this seems to me like a series of small signals that the present economy is really not working. Now would be a good time to learn where your things come from and plan for alternative, local sourcing if possible. This is probably easier for food and hand tools than shoes and medications.
Some of it could be remedied quite quickly by a government that prioritises the wellbeing of citizens over the profits of corporations, but… well, forgive me for my cynicism about the coming UK election. I will be voting tactically to get the Tories out, but I’m not hopeful that it will make any difference. I would love to be wrong.
“I think people still expect change to happen suddenly, all at once, everywhere — rather than in a series of short localised shocks combined with incremental falling apart. ”
That is more-or-less what I meant when I said, in a long-ago comment, that I do not think things will collapse, I think they will crumble.
Yes, crumbling is a good way to think.about it. Of course, if what’s crumbling is a pillar holding up your roof, the local effects can go from vaguely worrisome to catastrophic rather quickly.
Another musing on community and culture: a lot of the things people used to do communally because they couldn’t be easily mechanised were things that also built culture. Big seasonal harvests, corn husking, even sitting by the fire all winter cracking nuts or spinning wool — these were times when communities would gather and tell their stories. I imagine cider pressing and the grape harvest.would be similar. Mechanising these things is obviously more efficient, in terms of using less human labour, but it also takes away the occasion for gathering together.
I don’t want to over-romanticise the hard work, or the emotional labour of dealing with all the varied personalities that turn up at such events and navigating what can be quite convoluted power dynamics. But sometimes I think the best way to a renewal of peasant culture might be to choose a crop that isn’t easy to mechanise and get together a group to harvest and process it.