Menu
Posted on June 2, 2024 | 58 Comments
The end of my last post left a few threads hanging, not least a promise to say something about Carwyn Graves’s wonderful book, Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape (2024, Calon). But let me approach obliquely from a more personal angle.
Sometimes I make the mistake of reading negative online comments about my writing. A comment I read under a YouTube interview I did a while ago went something along the lines of “what Smaje didn’t mention is that he keeps sheep, which have a brutal ecological impact”.
Now, it’s true that for about six of the twenty years I’ve worked these 18 acres, I’ve kept sheep – currently to the tune of three breeding ewes. I concede that sheep can have a brutal ecological impact, but I don’t think they especially have done in our case. Indeed, we recently had a visit from an avowedly sheep-hating professional ecologist who was in raptures about the ecological riches of our holding.
In other words, the answer to the question of whether sheep have a brutal ecological impact is, as to many other ecological questions, “it depends” (I’m not going to get into the issue here of whether sheep have a brutal climate impact, but I think the answers lie somewhere on the continuum between ‘it depends’ and ‘no’).
Unfortunately, far too much public debate about farming and ecology involves recycling over-generalised nostrums of this sort about what’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at a global level. Increasingly, not only sheep or livestock farming (on which note, Cat Frampton’s impassioned critique of DEFRA’s latest on scrub creation is worth a read), but farming in its entirety gets banished to the naughty step in this way. I even heard a young man in an interview recently stating “Farming needs to stop. It’s the single biggest driver of climate change”. I can’t honestly blame him for this confusion given the journalistic narratives that are swirling around these days, but we somehow need to raise the level of the discussion.
Into this dismal world, Carwyn’s book Tir enters like a breath of fresh air. I can’t even begin to convey the riches of the book or the astonishing amount of complexity Carwyn somehow manages to cram into its few pages – perhaps I’ll write a lengthier appreciation another time – but the book is an invitation into a different way of seeing. Not an overgeneralized screed about the evils of farming or human impacts worldwide, but a close look at the intertwined culture history and landscape history of a place, or in fact a set of places, enabling a long and local view of how their human and more-than-human ecologies have played out in the past, and may play out in the future.
The place(s) in question, of course, is Wales, which has been in the frontline of the ‘rewilding’ and anti-livestock media wars in Britain. These have centred on upland sheep farming, which is so often indicted for its inherently brutal ecological – well, you get the picture.
Carwyn navigates this issue skilfully in his book. For one thing, he de-centres sheep in Welsh agricultural history, uncovering a more varied past that included arable farming and mixed farming using cattle more than sheep, as well as smallholding and orcharding. At the same time, he doesn’t ignore the sheep issue or dodge its impact – but the long historical view he takes is informative.
People were resident in what’s now Wales, he points out, almost as soon as the Ice Age loosened its grip. There never was an unpeopled wilderness of ‘self-willed’ nature there, but instead a deep history of upland open grazing stretching back into the Neolithic, with sheep in evidence over the last 6,000 years. Carwyn readily identifies the problems caused by sheep in the uplands today, but these are problems caused by 20th century government policies familiar from agricultural ‘improvement’ worldwide – an emphasis on increased productivity of the few crops where there’s local comparative advantage, increased high-energy inputs, increased global market connection, increased farm size, decreased labour inputs and decreased agricultural and natural diversity.
And so we come to the present situation – overstocked monocultural upland sheep farms clinging to financial viability via government subsidies in the face of desperate global commodity prices, and the argument that it would therefore be better to ‘rewild’ them.
Carwyn points out that the word for culture in Welsh, diwylliant, has a more direct connotation of ‘unwilding’ than its English counterpart, and that Welsh concepts of culture reference a collective endeavour to which everyone contributes. Fundamentally they’re keyed to a knowledge of a richly enculturated and cultivated landscape, which he examines with reference to some of its key terms: cloddiau, cae, ffridd, rhos and perllan among others.
In this context, talk of ‘rewilding’ must sound “very much like ‘killing [a] culture’” (p.12), especially when it’s mouthed by privileged English environmentalists and heard in Welsh-speaking rural communities who didn’t ask for the high input, low food price, subsidy-fuelled agricultural ‘improvement’ that emptied the villages and filled the hills with sheep. Carwyn shows with great subtlety throughout his book how peopled local farmscapes producing diverse food for mostly local consumption can represent a win-win for both local communities and wildlife. The crisis we now face, he says, “stems from our abuse of nature – not our use of it in the first place” (p.187). He estimates that sheep stocking rates of about half current levels could be sustainable in parts of Wales like Ceredigion.
Here’s another parting of the ways from what I’ve heard described as the ‘clearance rewilding’ implied in the thinking of those who bandy around terms like ‘sheepwrecked’, and who believe – as one of my antagonists put it – that “nature does best without us”. I’m with Carwyn in his view that nature can do just fine with us, indeed that ‘doing without us’ is philosophically incoherent and denies the embodiment, animality, fragility and interdependence that I mentioned in my previous post. The alternative to clearance rewilding is what some are calling agri-rewilding, which in many places means choosing farming practices that are closer to those that preceded the yield-obsessed productivism of the postwar years. This doesn’t necessarily produce less food. It may even produce more. But it does produce less food commodities.
And so we come to the title of this post and my previous one. If we can speak of sheepwrecked landscapes, we must also speak of wheatwrecked, soywrecked, avocadowrecked, palmwrecked, coconutwrecked, vinewrecked, cottonwrecked, sprucewrecked and a whole other raft of x-wrecked landscapes. What unites them is food or fibre as commodity, abstracted as cheaply as possible from a local farmed landscape to serve other, mostly urban ones. Commodity-wrecked. C-wrecked. Making too big a deal about the specific commodity in a given place – such as sheep in upland Wales – risks missing the bigger picture of a general overproduction in the global agricultural and wider economy. But if we really want to name the culprits in these wider economies, pride of place would have to go to fossil fuels, cereal grains and grain legumes. Ultimately, it’s these that drive more local form of C-wrecking, including those in upland Wales.
There’s another kind of C-wrecking that Carwyn touches on briefly in his fascinating interview with a mountain shepherd called Erwyd as he discusses the abandoned mountain farmhouses of mid Wales.
It is sometimes lonely now in these places – I can go to them and remember the people who were there, and the voices and the busyness. They had a hard life, that is true, but yet again – they didn’t have the same pressure on them as today, and they had more leisure as well, and certainty, which a lot of people are missing now (p.108)
Certainty. I’ll want to come back to that in future writing. I think Erwyd is right. There’s a wrecked certainty in modernist culture, which it ironically broadcasts in the apparent certainty with which it deprecates the past and romanticises the present and the future.
Finally in relation to Wales, I had an interesting conversation with a farmer in Talgarth when I visited Black Mountains College recently. He said that a lot of farmers in the area were thinking of quitting commercial farming due to the desperate commodity prices and focusing instead on feeding their families and communities (referring back to my previous post, perhaps a straw in the wind for a new phase in the politics of agrarian transition, where the transition to a small farm future starts to fare a little better as farmers quit the global C-system). Other farmers, he told me, were thinking of selling up – at least the ones who had something to sell that wasn’t already owned by the bank.
High among the categories of buyers, he said, were corporations looking at tree-planting for carbon offsets. As per a recent debate on here, now that a certain kind of educated (but not necessarily well-informed) opinion has swung against farming (“farming needs to stop!”), it seems poised to repeat exactly the same mistakes as the earlier phase of agricultural C-wrecking in relation to its new enthusiasm for forestry monocultures devoted to carbon sequestration, to which the lifeless conifer plantations foisted on Welsh farmers in the previous era of landscape ‘improvement’ that Carwyn discusses in his book stand as a sombre warning. Hence, some other forms of C-wrecking to consider – carbon-wrecking, and culture-wrecking of landscapes and people.
All the same, Carwyn is quite upbeat about the future for both farming and wildlife in Wales. The present crisis, he says, is too urgent for us to spend time in large-scale landscape terraforming, but the good news is that the long evolution of small-scale, low-input mixed farming in Wales means that the key building blocks are already in place (pp.168-9).
I wonder how much you can say the same for places that have been more in the thick of colonial-modernist terraforming and the associated cultural remoulding – the soy, corn and wheat-growing areas of the USA, for example, or, well, most of my home country of England, just across the border from Carwyn. One of the criticisms I sometimes get for my vision of a small farm future is that the costs of reconstructing small farm landscapes within existing C-wrecked countrysides is too great. Which I fear could be true, although the costs would undoubtedly be less than persisting with our present C-wrecked urbanism. An interesting aspect of this, replicating the trickle of back-to-the-landers from previous generations, is whether the less ‘productive’ landscapes typical of Wales might be more appealing to the would-be smallholder than, say, the wheatwrecked farmlands of eastern England precisely because they haven’t been terraformed to an anachronistically large-scale, high-energy and monocultural agriculture. As is often the case, renewal may come from the margins.
As I was drafting this piece, I came across a pile of old magazines, one of which contained a scornful review by Jonathan Raban from 2010 of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory. Blond served as David Cameron’s house intellectual around that time as Cameron sought to rebuild the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects after thirteen years of Labour governments. In his review, Raban took special exception to the influence of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton on Blond – Distributist ancestors to part of my own agrarian vision – offering the usual excoriations about their “homesickness for a rural and small-town life that never existed outside their Arcadian dreams of Merrie England”. Distributist ideas like widespread, mortgage-free property ownership might go down well at the pub in the BBC’s rural soap opera The Archers, said Raban, “but what meaning they might have for people on sink estates or in sprawling, ethnically diverse conurbations…is beyond comprehension”.
I’d venture to say that mortgage-free ownership of their own property might go down pretty well with many such people, especially after fourteen years of defiantly non-Red Toryism and grim austerity initiated by David Cameron, who quickly discarded Blond once he became Prime Minister. And so it was with the original Distributists – too conservative to embrace the genuine radicalism of their own vision in which government is generated bottom-up by self-possessed people with the means to make a livelihood, rather than top-down by a state which offers services in return for claiming the ultimate prerogative to rule (I’ll mention another book in passing here – an old one by John Hoffman called Sovereignty – that I read recently by chance and found informative on these points. I hope to say more about it as some point).
Raban is surely right that the Distributism of Belloc and Chesterton can’t serve unaltered as a model for present politics. But I’m wondering if it would be possible to write a book about England – not Merrie England, just England – with similar aspirations to Carwyn’s book about Wales. I think it might be harder to find a unifying thread. But if I were that author – and I’m kind of wondering if I should be – I’d be less dismissive of some of what Belloc and Chesterton had to say. It’s true of course that Merrie England has never existed – and I’m not sure if Belloc and Chesterton really thought it had – but we too easily create another myth of present and future merrie-ness if we set ourselves determinedly against learning any lessons from the past.
A final point, briefly. I’m conscious that all the books I’ve discussed in this post and the last one were written by men. I’ve got quite a pile of female-authored books in the in-tray and hope to make some amends in that respect soon. But more importantly, gender issues in one form or another have been occupying my thoughts lately, not least in relation to agrarian transitions. So I hope to write about that too.
Peter Heather & John Rapley Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West
Caroline Lucas Another England
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS
I have not read Carwyn’s book and I probably lack a proper understanding of the differences between regions in England (or those in Wales for that matter), but I wonder why England as opposed to Somerset? I can imagine huge challenges in writing about, say, Northumbria, Cornwall, the fens of East Anglia, Kent, Essex, and Hampshire all in the same book. Doing this well and thoroughly strikes me as an enormous undertaking, but I am not a writer.
Of courses this might be some of what you mean when you say it might be harder to find a unifying thread. Case studies could do a lot, of course, especially if refugia are part of your focus, but these lend themselves to accusations of cherry-picking.
Still, my underlying instinct is to ask what purpose is served by using a modern nation-state like England as the contextual framing. I can think of a few good reasons for that, and also a few bad ones.
As I’ve spent the whole weekend picking and processing cherries with the family, and we’re still at it, I say ‘pick away!’
As you say, it’s often the margins where renewal may happen. Mike Donovan of Practical Farm Ideas magazine might provide some interesting pointers to that end, though I’m sure you’re not short of ideas. Graves’s book sounds a rewarding read. Also, thanks for bringing my first ever game of online WordWang to a swift conclusion. Commodity – got it.
It is a happy prospect to hear that good people, from various parts of the world and country, are working out how best to live well with the land and all the animals. It sounds like a great book. I’d love to read one about England, hopefully it will uncover the people already working on these principles in the regions and shires. I agree with Kathryn, you could start locally, but also, why not? Very encouraging to hear the farmers working it out, they need to be finding other ways – we need to find other ways of making sure they don’t go into the hands of corporations.
For Merrie Old England, I’d say it’s a kind of philosophical question on one hand – who can know what they have not personally witnessed (and if they don’t know what it is)? And on the other hand there were communities here, so deeply tied and culturally cohesive that they fought and died for their life ways. That will have included much merriment – for without it, a community is not much at all. This, I think, is the unravelling of the Conservative position, a congregation built on bullying and fear, whose merriment is a venal display of power. The disappearing of merrie England is another example of such a position. That it wasn’t at all times everywhere is a poor argument for its non existence.
Lastly I cannot recommend highly enough, Commoners by JM Neeson and The Moral Economy of the Middle Ages, both female writers. And what emerges from their close reading is a people in full knowledge of their place and rights enjoying it to its full.
I was looking for your book recommendations but can’t find, The Moral Economy of the Middle Ages, did you mean the Countryside, rather than Middle Ages?
Thank
Yes, your right, it is The Moral Economy of the Countryside, by Rosamund Faith
Thank you
Ps forgot to say commodity wrecked is a very useful term and concept and nicely rounds out the partisan sheep wrecked.
Agreed, Joel. It’s also a deeper and more perceptive perspective of the punning ‘sheep wrecked’, revealing the latter for the superficial kneejerk that it is.
Chris wrote: “It’s true of course that Merrie England has never existed – and I’m not sure if Belloc and Chesterton really thought it had…”
Curious about Chesterton’s views, I found that he claimed the “quite indubitable” Merrie England could be glimpsed in Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, specifically regarding “a merry supernaturalism” (with “generous and wholesome superstition” to counterbalance the “morbid and dangerous” superstitions which currently remain).
“The play is the last glimpse of Merrie England, that distant but shining and quite indubitable country. It would be difficult indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase “merrie England”, though some conception of it is quite necessary to the comprehension of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In some cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism. Amid all the great work of Puritanism the damning indictment of it consists in one fact, that there was one only of the fables of Christendom that it retained and renewed, and that was the belief in witchcraft. It cast away the generous and wholesome superstition, it approved only of the morbid and the dangerous. In their treatment of the great national fairy-tale of good and evil, the Puritans killed St. George but carefully preserved the Dragon, And this seventeenth-century tradition of dealing with the psychic life still lies like a great shadow over England and America, so that if we glance at a novel about occultism we may be perfectly certain that it deals with sad or evil destiny. Whatever else we expect we certainly should never expect to find in it spirits such as those in as inspirers of a tale of tomfoolery like the Wrong Box or The Londoners. That impossibility is the disappearance of “merrie England” and Robin Goodfellow.”
https://www.chesterton.org/midsummer-nights-dream/
Merrie England is described here as “an England where individuals owned the land on which they lived and worked.”
“Like Tolkien, Chesterton saw Merrie England as an idealized view of what England had been and what she could be. It was an England free of post-Reformation Puritanism and post-industrial proletarianism, an England where individuals owned the land on which they lived and worked. It was Blake’s green and pleasant land liberated from the dominion of dark, satanic mills.”
Tolkien, Man and Myth
By Joseph Pearce
https://books.google.com/books?id=oRmgDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PT161&f=false#v=onepage&q&f=false
Chris,
Thanks
While I define myself as ‘English’ my mother was born in Sketty & my father worked in Cardiff and Swansea in the 1950’s, and we holidayed on a farm in Wales so I have an affinity for the place.
I must get the book, but as you say the history of Welsh farming isnt that simple
Adrian Vaughan
https://www.adrianvaughan.co.uk/about
did have a fascinating item on his website sadly now gone referring to his parents interest in Distributism and Merrie England and the sort of rural utopia that Tom Rolt believed in which as he pointed out was ‘false history’
John, are you familiar with the Wayback Machine?
I see that Adrian Vaughan’s website has page archives from 2012, 13, and 2016-2021.
I don’t think you can search within the archived pages, so you would need to have a vague idea of when the story you are referring to was published.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131008223935/http://www.adrianvaughan.co.uk/latest-news/
‘Tir’ sounds really interesting, Chris. It seems to me that it chimes with what Robin Wall Kimmerer says in ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ and Bruce Pascoe says in ‘Dark Emu’ about ways in which humans and other species – IN RELATIONSHIP – are or can be mutually beneficial. More sweetgrass grows and more kangaroos flourish when there is a judicious harvest, at the right time(s) and with the right protocols.
Industrial agriculture and food systems are devoid of such relationships, but see human prosumers as objects of exploitation, not care. And yet… the ‘old ways’ are not dead, even in England. When I watched the short documentary ‘Ancient Tradition of Singing to Trees’ (2019), on line, which is about the wassail protocols alive and well in Devon today, I saw people who do not separate caring for trees from caring for humans.
LOTS more one could say on this way of looking at things, of course – but perhaps you would find David Fleming’s ‘Surviving the Future’ useful as an Englishman’s take on the subject.
In answer to Kathryn’s questions, the point of writing about England rather than, say, Somerset is because in the near future what happens in Somerset will be heavily conditioned by what happens in England. For things in Somerset (and other English places) to really prosper, I think we need a different political imaginary in England, and that would be a major point of the book.
England isn’t technically a nation-state but the most populous and powerful nation within a multinational state. I agree with Kathryn that there’s something slightly queasy about writing specifically about England in a way that doesn’t hold true for Wales or Scotland. That also makes it an interesting thing to do.
I also agree that it would be difficult to write well about the agricultural ecology of the whole of England. Although the same is true of Wales, or any other whole country. But I think it’s possible to write worthwhile things at different levels of detail, especially since most people know very little at all about the historical agricultural ecologies of their countries. However, as is my way I would probably focus a little less on the agrarian ecology than Carwyn and a little more on the politics.
Steve has me hoisted by my own petard on the topic of merrie England! However, as was typical of him, the quotation from Chesterton reveals a funny and nuanced position, not IMO what Raban calls a ‘crankish’ vision. This is part of the problem. What could be more crankish that currently regnant notions that the global pursuit of profit maximises wellbeing for all? Yet it’s efforts to transcend such crankiness that usually get dismissed for their absurdity – a problem I’ve had with the ‘Regenesis’ debate.
Some of the basic building blocks of distributist thinking like secure proprietorship, commons and community-oriented work strike me as eminently sensible, which is why I find the movement interesting. However, I agree that it can nourish a more problematic and inward-looking form of politics. Interesting that Tolkien apparently took it in that direction in his fiction. I have to confess (gasp!) that I’ve never read Tolkien or even watched the movies … but it’s also interesting how wildly popular his writing has been, given the alleged crankiness.
I endorse Joel’s recommendations of J.M. Neeson’s and Rosamund Faith’s books – both great books.
Which leads to John’s point about ‘false history’. I think history is always false to some degree, and people are always combing the past for a lineage to inform their present thinking, which is always only one choice among many. Neeson’s and Faith’s books can inform radical contemporary thinking around the enclosure of the commons and the invasion of Norman landlords as historical wrongs to be righted, but the story is always more complex. Generally, it’s best to avoid false history of the form ‘everybody lived happily together before x happened’. However, modernism merely inverts that, to yield ‘everybody was miserable before modernity set us on a path to the future where everybody will live happily’. I think the notion of historical wrong turns is interesting, provided it doesn’t over-idealise what went before. It’s funny how some people can have very strong political views about what should or shouldn’t happen in contemporary times, and yet are contemptuous about any such claims when they’re applied to the past.
Much to agree with in Christine’s comment, and it’s wise to link Carwyn to writers like Kimmerer and Pascoe. I wrote a slightly sniffy review of Fleming’s Lean Logic when it came out largely because I was a bit more wedded to left-wing orthodoxy back then – but even then I found it very informative.
Thanks Chris, a lot of great points
Wrt Kathryn’s comment: any challenge to the automatic assumption that we have to remain tied to the current model of nations/states, as we try to build a better world, feels very welcome at this point.
It may well be that we still need to operate on that scale for some time, but it feels like such a huge and fundamental stumbling block to so much thinking. If we don’t look carefully at this framing, our thoughts and ideas can immediately take on the rootless and alienating conditions we’re trying to get away from.
It’s very difficult to think with any real depth on that scale, let alone the scale of the global culture and economy…
The more attention and effort we can reclaim from these highly stretched networks, that can distract and spread us like a nano-thin biofilm around the planet, in order to be able to focus on the work needed immediately around us and under our feet, the better, I feel. That doesn’t necessarily preclude working at a larger scale, but it might help do so from more solid roots.
Thanks Parsifal. Yes, I very much agree with your take here. But I suppose something still interests me about having to deal with the legacy of the nation-state in relinquishing it, which draws us to some kind of reckoning with it. In a British context, England, Wales and Scotland are quite old political entities that long predate the nation-state building modern period, so that’s quite interesting too. And if Scotland and Wales were to separate from England … also interesting!
To be honest I get confused over the categories – nation, state, etc. To me they’re all insanely excessively large bases of pyramids funneling power to a very small point at the top. I find it hard to take them seriously really as a concept, they’re so self-evidently absurd.
I’m trying to find the middle way too – for the local, earth-connected path I’m trying to both enact as much as possible now, and also lay the foundations for in the future.
But there’s something about the idea of activism as ‘acting as if one is already free’ (Graeber i think) that seems very important. How to act towards structures without reaffirming their power imbalance? When I see a protest demanding change from the government, I see that as at least partly reaffirming (and thus strengthening) who has the power and responsibility – when at some level, the root cause is that we have been trained into giving away responsibility and power (and that mindless consumption will somehow fill the holes that leaves).
Collective change involves individual change. I worry that part of the problem is this blindness to our own power and responsibility. Everyone will be forced to change their lifestyles eventually anyway. And the power only flows the way it does because everyone buys into it.
And as well as how, at what point do we stop maintaining that flow, and start to reclaim our agency? Well, I know this happens all the time, in lots of ways, big and small. And it’s very deep and difficult work, so I understand why people would rather push change away from them, into institutions we’ve been brought up to trust as the grounds for our reality. I’m not trying to suggest all protest is doing this, just that there is a key and fundamental complexity that seems to be left out of the discussion more often than not.
And the middle way is probably a both/and. But that is too complex for our binary collective consciousness, so the messaging constantly reinforces only one side of it, and it feels like a constant challenge to keep bringing light to what is made invisible. Most of the media will actively filter this out, yet it feels like the centre of gravity of the power structures is so huge that everyone repeats these patterns, and the result is the same distortions.
Yes, right now we need the government to help, and we also need every single person alive to take responsibility… learn to release dependence… learn how powerful they really are. What tone of voice can convey this that can appeal to the largest possible group of people?
And – why does nobody seem to talk about happiness in all this? What will make you as happy as you can be? Agency, community, nature, health… in a way this seems to be very close to the ultimate goal, and a great motivator. And there is lots of decent research.
This is what I’m wrestling with a little at the moment. Perhaps there has been lots written that I’m unaware of, I’m having a bit of a political awakening, so please forgive any naivety!
Hi Parsifal
Commiserations on not getting quite to grips with the technicality of nation-states Vs nations Vs national identities, particularly in the British Isles… treacherous ground at the best of times. I do worry that localism is too easily captured by xenophobia and various forms of supremacist nationalism.
The thing about states (or whatever) as a social construct is that they do wield real power. But there are limits on that power, and there is a lot that can be done in the margins to build for the future. A concept that comes up here sometimes (okay, okay, I bring it up whenever I can) is that of refugia. In ecology, refugia are small pockets of habitat that are somewhat protected from a widespread disturbance (such as a wildfire or volcanic eruption), and from which the surrounding area can be re-populated once the disturbance has passed. A lot of the way I frame my own provisioning is in such terms: yes, I want to eat strawberries and potatoes now, but I also want to build good soil, learn skills, and develop relationships with my own local community to increase overall resilience.
How to act critically toward power without reaffirming it is a big question, and I think it does relate to your question about happiness. When the Pharisees asked Jesus a similar question he asked them whose face was on the coin and told them to tender into Caesar that which is Caesar’s; a rejection of worldly values imposed by the occupying Roman forces, and a rebuke to those who had allowed those values to become important. In the context of this post, I think it might mean placing our happiness — or at least our values — outside of the world of commodities. Self-provisioning and community solidarity are one way to do that. What I think of as “human re-wilding” (in the form of e.g. guerilla gardening) might be another.
I agree whole heartedly with your thinking, and your in the right place to start unravelling those questions.
@ Kathryn,
You may already have one or it might be too warm in Merrie Olde England but our Dutch neighbors showed us how to build a pit root cellar. They have a footprint less than 1/2 meter sq and keep root veggies beautifully. We have a real walk in root cellar now, but we would still be eating our own potatoes (carrots would still be long gone) with a pit root cellar.
@Greg
A pit root cellar at the allotment would quickly fill with water in winter, and one in the back garden would be very difficult to keep rat-free while also possibly violating the terms of our tenancy. Things in raised beds that are okay with some frost do all right — the carrots start getting real hairy around February but are still perfectly edible — and with spuds in pots I can move the pots into the greenhouse (but that is also not rodent-proof, and it’s warm, dry, and free of predators).
I’m thinking about doing more fermentation and pickling of vegetables this summer and autumn, and maybe more dehydration too. Space is an issue whatever I do, though.
I have been experimenting with fermentation more, recently, though, and I think that might help. And I do have pressure canning facilities and a chest freezer. But I also still have plenty of winter squash from the 2023 harvest, and I find myself leaning toward
When I was young and living in England the nation state did not have the grip it has now , A person from Liverpool could hardly understand someone from Newcastle on Tyne , Zumerset had a language all of its own as had northern Ireland , the people of the UK have been forced into one size fits all ,” when “not” if ” Westminster government breaks down ( looking at the debacle of the coming UK
election ) it won’t be that long Britain has a strong local heritage that could easily come back
I wrote a slightly sniffy review of Fleming’s Lean Logic when it came out largely because I was a bit more wedded to left-wing orthodoxy back then
trivial side comment: that made me smile – I’d say you were not so much ‘wedded to an orthodoxy’, as rather ‘attached to an identity’.
Myself, I’ve stopped using the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ in a political sense. They’re not completely meaningless, but the words have become too baggy to help – naming yourself as one or the other has become more like declaring ones support for a football team than anything else.
So much that resonates in this piece, Chris.
I’m particularly struck by what you say about “wrecked certainty”: the contrast between the culturally located certainty-from-within described by Erwyd the shepherd and the abstract certainty-from-afar that modernity seems to grip increasingly tightly, as the sense of crisis takes hold.
And there’s an echo between this and two kinds of belonging: the culturally located belonging which is part of what Erwyd is describing and the more abstract belonging of the nationalisms of the 19th and 20th century, whose function was precisely to substitute for the loss of more specific and local experiences of belonging. I need to go back and look at Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, but my sense is that at least in the way his phrase has circulated, it ends up blurring the distinction between these two types of belonging. On the one hand, imagination always plays a role in the ways that humans make lives together in particular times and places; on the other hand, there is a particular kind of trouble that comes from attaching the need for belonging to large, constructed entities such as the modern nation, or else despising belonging altogether because of the toxicity that can be brewed in the vessel of those national abstractions.
Something of a side-track from the main thrust of your post, Chris, but thanks for setting me thinking.
Thanks Dougald. Yes, Erwyd’s ‘certainty’ remark leapt out at me for the reasons that you’ve admirably clarified. Certainty-from-within versus certainty-from-afar is a good way of framing it I think. There are ways in which the two have sometimes combined historically (peasants supporting fascist parties in Europe, for example) but I think our modern narratives aren’t well attuned to the real cadences of the former, and aren’t sufficiently aware of the dangers within their own abstractions. I hope to come back to these issues.
I haven’t looked at Anderson’s book for a long time but my recollection is that he was broadly quite positive about the modernist construction of imagined communities around nationalist abstractions – albeit perhaps mostly in a Global South context as a form of anti-colonialism. If that’s right, I think I’d still beg to differ with him!.
Sounds like there is much for your readers to look forward too Chris.
Thanks – hope so!
Alice likes to talk about carrots – when people can’t get carrots from the supermarket. So, in relation to certainty, the scales are tipping between the certainty of being able to grow carrots on land you have secure access to (and its access to control) and the certainty that you can buy carrots at the supermarket with money you have secure access to (and its lack of access to control).
I would like to hear of Englands history of Carnival and festival, its coming up all around, with Bayo Akomolafe and Rachel Donald asking us to throw ourselves into its topsy-turvy spaces.
Also, it could be interesting to see how the regions relate to the bioregions, if at all. Some more threads to weave!
For me carrots also depend on access to some combination of:
– carrot root fly resistant seed (the ones I can find, though, are both F1 varieties that don’t breed true, and even stabilising their offspring might be non-trivial because of cytoplasmic male sterility; I haven’t yet checked whether CMS is an issue in those particular carrot varieties)
– fine plastic netting to keep root fly out (works well unless the carrot root fly gets in there first, at which point they are just living their best life under the netting away from predators)
– parasitic nematodes (expensive, and the timing is fiddly)
I’ve also been told that because carrot root fly mostly jumps and crawls rather than flying, it can be easier to grow carrots in very tall raised beds or barrels. I don’t think anyone told the carrot root flies at our allotment that those are the rules of the game. Similarly, growing them with alliums doesn’t seem to do much good.
But even carrots riddled with root fly larvae tracks are better than no carrots at all, especially if there aren’t many other veg about.
Meanwhile, yesterday at the allotment I harvested more strawberries than I used to purchase in a year.
Just to follow up on a few new comments from above…
I discovered today that John Lewis-Stempel is shortly publishing a book called ‘England: A Natural History’, so maybe that’s that side of it taken care of! Meanwhile, I’ve just started reading Caroline Lucas’s book ‘Another England’ on the political side of things. Her view is that ‘progressives’ need to address the nature of England as a political entity, otherwise the ‘populists’ or the right have free rein. I’m not very far in, but I think I’m going to have some issues with her book, even though I appreciate what she’s trying to do and her basic goodwill. Still, while I agree with Parsifal & Kathryn that ‘England’ isn’t the right organisational scale or political concept, I think the idea of it and the organisational power of its central government isn’t going to disappear overnight, and this is what remains of interest to me.
Re Martin’s comment, yes ‘attached to an identity’ rather than ‘wedded to an orthodoxy’ is probably closer to the mark. There are still some aspects of Fleming’s thinking that trouble me, but he left a rich legacy. Kai Heron & Alex Heffron called his vision ‘genocidal’ … heaven forbid that anyone should say anything similar about me!
Interesting remarks about carrots from Joel, Alice & Kathryn. Indeed, I think the crunch, if you’ll pardon the pun, comes when the normal market or state routes can no longer offer people basic services like carrots or healthcare, and then interesting things start happening politically. The practicalities of carrot-growing in a low-energy localized future also get interesting along the lines Kathryn suggests in terms of resistant seed varieties and/or sourcing agri-plastics or other defences. Seems to me that vegetable seeds have been a sorely neglected part of our recent agrarian heritage in terms of the breeding of them and of local cultural knowledges about them. Another arena of necessary activism!
Thanks also for your remarks on carnival Joel – agreed. Do you have links to what Bayo Akomolafe and Rachel Donald said?
The Going To Seed landrace gardening forum had a UK “seed train” this year in which I participated. (I find the forum itself a bit much to deal with.)
I’m working on developing a swarm or grex of blight-resistant tomatoes that don’t taste like cardboard, but I expect it will take several years to select for both traits. I’m starting with commercial F1 varieties that taste good and have some blight resistance. I’m also playing around with direct-sown outdoor melons, though in fairness I am sowing them in hot beds, which is kindof cheating. But if I get any fruit I’ll certainly be saving the seeds from them.
If people are looking for open-pollinated seed that does well in the UK, Real Seeds does excellent work, and there is the Heritage Seed Library. Vital Seeds, the Wales Seed Hub and Seeds of Scotland are also well worth looking at. For heirloom beans, I’ve been able to find some interesting varieties at Beans and Herbs. Franchi seeds does a wide range of rare/interesting varieties and you get loads and loads of seed per packet but IIRC they are not grown in the UK. I’m not sure of the provenance of the seed at Pennard Plants.
I also save and sow seed from various street trees and wild plants. This is not always trivial; rodents got my stone fruit this year (grr) so better fortifications are in order, I think. I don’t actually know how long it takes feijoa to start fruiting. I didn’t cold stratify the Saskatoon berry seeds enough and will have to have another go. The Agroforestry Research Trust has quite a bit of seed for sale if anyone wants to throw money at longer-term perennial breeding projects.
There’s definitely a tension between trying to maintain heritage or heirloom varieties, and crossing and selecting them for better future resilience to unknown conditions. I’m mostly not bothering to preserve varieties that outcross readily, because isolating them is difficult in my context — even if I personally only grow one variety at the allotment, there are many other plots, so I would need to get elaborate with screens and so on. But genetic resilience of seeds is definitely something that I think about, and I hope that in a few years I will have enough reliable tomato seed to start sharing it, at least. Maybe someone else can do carrots.
As for England, merrie or otherwise, it is certainly something that exists in the popular imagination, and “English” is certainly an identity that politicians seem to be competing to define. This strikes me as interesting because of the degree to which the current government has been co-opted or captured by corporations, whose interests have nothing to do with national wellbeing, and which are themselves funnels for the enrichment of already very wealthy individuals.
I don’t suppose you can write this next book before July…
Having written ‘Saying NO…’ in 2 months, a 1 month book is the obvious next step, but regretfully I feel I must decline the challenge.
I think I’d like to write something broadly about distributism & the politics of localism. Steve L made some suggestions along these lines: https://chrissmaje.com/2024/05/remembering-peasants-anticipating-peasants/#comment-263081.
I like the sound of his book, but I think I’d prefer to write something more grounded in my own experiences in a country I know, rather than about places I’ve only read about – hence in part these ideas about writing about England, and my particular corner of it. But maybe that would limit the appeal too much. I’m interested in any thoughts.
“Future Farming Now: The Joys and Challenges for Local Communities in Building Relationships, Feeding One Another and Overcoming Extractive Politics” or something along those lines….?
It’s probably a good thing I don’t write titles…
“Small is beetrootiful”?
I suppose another question I have around all this is: if commodities (or at least, extractive models for procuring and exchanging them) are the problem, what is a de-commodified production called?
I think of my own production as largely “household harvest” and “surplus/community harvest”, with additional harvest in the Soup Garden and actual paid work in the community garden (though this is not assessed at the market value of the produce, but rather based on the hours I work). Notably, none of these are cash or commodity crops as such. I suppose it would make sense to speak of direct provisioning as opposed to commodity provisioning; but when does a cash crop grown for a local market turn into a commodity that extracts value (or energy or whatever) from producers? I want to say it’s at the point when a third party who is neither producer nor consumer makes some profit on the sale — this might be a landlord, a government levying taxes, or a corporation involved in equipment mortgages. And further questions arise from that: whether there is some level of any of these that is actually sustainable, how communities/households/farms survive in the present, extractive order while also embodying and experimenting with structures and systems that are more appropriate to living in some kind of balance. How to finance all this pre-figurative stuff is something that occupies a fair amount of our time and energy at church, which then brings me to the role of religious communities (such as the ones at Hillfield Friary and Mucknell Abbey, which both have at least some ecological focus). I think these are, in truth, largely financed by being retreat houses, which is not so very far away from smallholdings that have a B&B or campground element.
Don’t forget the grain traders.
I think the distinction is food. If it is food, it is not a commodity. If it just bushels of yellow stuff, it probably isn’t food.
I can grow a lot more grain than we can use (but not enough to be considered for purchase at a grain elevator). It mostly goes to cover crops and a little (maybe 1/4) goes to various neighbors as different types of flour.
Supporting the local economy / community is hard in our present system. Small scale production takes a lot more time than mass production. Imagine building a bicycle on your own. It would be a very expensive bicycle. Food is the same in a way.
You have to build the soil to grow the grain. And when you are done, the soil has to be maintained or improved so it is ready to produce the next crop. Usually a legume so veggies can be grown. All of this pretty quickly leads to seed cleaning and sorting and expenses that absolutely are not externalized.
@Greg
I’m not sure “is it food?” is the best determinant of whether something is a commodity; cash crops like sugar cane, bananas and chocolate have all been part of extractive models of production that cause substantial harm.
Maybe “is this a commodity transaction that is destructive?” can be at least partly answered by whether third parties get more share of the retail price than the producers do.
That would encompass just about all of our current food system, but that only illustrates the scale of the problem. And getting that number down to, say, 50% would necessitate much shorter and simpler supply chains.
This year I have been putting a retail value into my growing and foraging spreadsheet, and it’s proving very difficult to price certain items — there’s just nowhere I could purchase green pine cones even if I wanted to, so does that mean they’re very expensive or very cheap? In the end I thought about what I’ll be doing with them, found a bottle of mugolio for sale on the internet, and did some algebra. I’m sure the people who picked the pine cones for that didn’t get paid what I’m putting in my spreadsheet, but I’m also sure the people who pick strawberries don’t get what I put in my spreadsheet for those.
This is very much a one-year experiment, all the recording of values is a pain in the neck. Maybe next year I’ll stick everything in Cronometer and see if I can give a rough quantification of nutrition.
An implicit part of food is community.
We live in the land of corn and soybeans. They are commodities. Nobody that grows them eat them. A few neighbors do feed some corn/silage to their cows. The dry corn we raise goes mostly to a small local seed company. The rest gets ground into corn meal. Our soybeans are mostly for feeding the soil. Only a few get made into tofu.
Pork chops from pigs raised on pasture by people we know, wrapped in white paper, with hand stamped labels, that is food. Boxes of anonymous slabs of dry, tasteless, gray flesh marked pork chops are commodities, not food. You can certainly tell if you try to eat one.
Commodities are part of the cheap food system that has ruined agriculture and killed rural communities. John Ikred (retired ag economist) says the problem with farm commodity programs (get big or get out) is that they forgot about the community when they set up those systems.
@Greg
To someone who is starving, the grey supermarket meat sure seems like food. I don’t think redefining food by the criteria you bring actually gets to the root of the commodity problem, and I don’t think commodities only exist in the realm of food systems.
@Kathryn,
?
I’m not sure about the point you are making. Your reply sounds like you support industrial agriculture. I’m pretty sure you don’t. And, ag policy has been ineffective in addressing poverty. Here, it seems like half of Congress believes in punishing the poor because they think poor people are lazy or something.
A better policy would be to have basic supports for farmers ( food is important !) and let food prices reflect the true costs of production. Subsidizing the poor so they can afford the cost of living is very effective. During Covid it was shown that even a small direct payment (child tax credits) lifted more families out of poverty than any other program in recent memory.
Obviously here are other commodities other than food. Oil and steel come to mind. The main topic in this post was the commodification of agriculture, mostly food ( sheep, wheat, soy, avocado, palm, coconut, grapes, cotton, lumber).
Ag commodities aren’t necessarily a problem but even two bushels of corn can have very different feed values depending on how they are raised. When they are all considered to be the same, the ones with the lowest price sells. Quality is in effect penalized. Production of commodities lead to cheap, low quality products, over production and externalized costs. The economics of that ruin the environment where they are produced.
I think that starting with appreciating the quality of locally produced food would help with the problems of the commodification in agriculture.
@Greg
I certainly don’t support industrial agriculture; I think we must be talking at cross-purposes.
What I was trying to find, several comments ago, was a single term to describe a non-commodified approach to production, while accepting that e.g. local markets might still have more parties than just producer and consumer. I want to find this because I think there is value in communicating what we are for, rather than only framing discussion in terms of what we are against.
I don’t think defining “food” (or “real food” or whatever) as the opposite of a commodity necessarily gets us any nearer to a positive definition, though.
We can use ‘decommodified’ As a transitional term, to allow people into the idea through the present use of language. Alice is using ‘care objects’, but to describe the process of moving from commodity to something outside of commodification is tricky.
I see Greg is describing the fact that good food as an essential care object should be shielded from industrial capitalism via regulation and social payments, which differs from decommodification of care objects altogether, essentially making them a birth right, like our access to the land.
Interesting to see the ‘feckless and lazy’ argument used by the American aristocracy Greg, first used against the peasants in the enclosures- nothing changes much!
Also, our journey into all this started with an acknowledgement of the commercial and domestic spheres, and the commercials creeping domination of the domestic. Could be helpful, domestic provisioning vs commercial provisioning?
@Joel
Aha — yes, I like “domestic” a lot.
Still — it’s not that a household cannot produce a cash crop from time to time (like my lemon balm tea for the tabletop sale, that then goes to support the food bank/soup kitchen, for which I also grow vegetables), or even go into a mutually-beneficial arrangement with some other households to produce e.g. wool or vanilla or tea on a communal basis; it’s that if a household is compelled to rely entirely on the sale of such cash crops, to the exclusion of other forms of self-provisioning, then that is a context that is ripe for exploitation — of people and of ecology.
That compulsion might come from being required to pay a tax in a certain currency; it might come from not having secure access to enough land of appropriate quality, or enough time, or enough water, to be able to meet the household’s subsistence needs; it might come from not being able to compete on price with Big Wool (or whatever), and so gradually having to turn more and more resources over to that cash crop in order to purchase the food that you aren’t producing because you’ve turned over so many resources to the cash crop.
One of the most valuable, or at least appreciated, crops I grow in the Soup Garden is fresh parsley. The dried stuff just isn’t a patch on fresh, nobody who uses the soup kitchen or food bank can afford to buy little bags of fresh parsley (or the tiny plastic pots full of peat), and the nearest street market with big bunches of it for a quid is quite some distance away (and those bunches are often of inferior quality to the really fresh stuff, having been grown in Turkey or the Netherlands and flown in). I’m now on the third cutting of the parsley I sowed in, I think, February, and every time I turn up in the kitchen with it the volunteers are delighted, even though it’s a lot less calories than some potatoes or even courgettes.
@Greg
Thinking further about your two bushels of corn that are very different in quality but end up having to be priced nearly the same in order to sell, maybe part of the issue with commodities is a sort of flattening or even collapse of context, of removal of what economists might call externalities from the conscious decisions of the purchaser. The more steps there are in a supply chain — the more sellers and purchasers — the more context is erased or elided.
Technophiles might say we could solve this by having two currencies (cash and a “carbon credit” system, which of course would then need to be expanded to include things like pollution, animal welfare, labour justice etc…) or something similarly convoluted, but at best this would involve gaming the system in some way and at worst it could be extremely punitive for those who are already poor. I’m sure a more local approach where people know the farmers who are producing most of their food, and have a hand in some of it themselves, is probably more effective.
Of course, a well-administered carbon credit system could actually encourage those local relationships and local production, but my cynicism levels are off the charts this morning, so I don’t expect any carbon credit system to be sensible at all. From that perspective, getting outside of any currency exchange for as much of my production as possible is the most resilient answer; but it’s no good me being self sufficient in winter squash if my neighbours can only afford battery eggs, so this also involves massive changes at community scale. It’s still better for me to grow the squash than not, though.
At the risk of blowing your own trumpet, you could profile small farms with a similar focus to your own, i.e. with an eye on ‘future proofing’, as far as that is possible. You’ve expressed an interest in the promise of perennial crops and food forests, you are active in getting interested locals involved on your farm, likewise school groups. There are so many aspects to what can make farms and gardens a real asset for an area that don’t have to involve monetary exchange. And then there’s the politics… I guess the skill would be in writing something that’s not simply a showcase of neat ideas lacking a deeper resonance and urgency. You have that skill. Another upside might be that it could involve one hell of a bike ride around green and pleasant land (with maybe a fine vlog on the side). Maybe it’s time to charge up the trike batteries?
For Bayo, part of dancing with Mountains
https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/offerings
For Rachel
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/the-world-is-absurd?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&publication_id=265792&post_id=144299921&triedRedirect=true
Thanks for the book suggestions & other comments. A bit too busy to comment at length at the moment, partly because I’ve been making hay. Scythe, pitchfork, wheelbarrow. Some may say these methods have been, er, eclipsed, or soon will be. But I’m not so sure.
I did do the classic haymaking thing of taking my shirt off, but I’m happy to report I didn’t go full Zardoz.
Anyway, I’ve got some posts lined up for the next few weeks, so I’ll be back here soon.
I’m only a very occasional commenter here, but I thought I’d let you know that I recently bought a small farm (5 hectares of agricultural land, 5 hectares of wooded land). So congratulations on your influence, I guess, and wish me luck! Not that you’re the reason I bought it, but I wouldn’t say you had zero influence.
Congratulations on your purchase, Elin! May your land stewardship be joyous and abundant.
Thanks for your good wishes! : )
Yes, congratulations indeed – my best wishes to you for your farm and farming. Honoured to have had a less than zero impact on your decision!
Thanks! : )
On a slight tangent (again)……….
I’ve been pondering “closed loop” systems and wonder if they are ever really possible long term?
Could Fukuoka actually grow continuous crops by using just the waste from the previous harvest as mulch? With rice and winter crops going “off site” to market, are too many nutrients leaving? Is it possible over multiple generations to maintain soil fertility without “imports”?
Edo Japan appeared to have things in balance but collecting leaves from the forests would eventually have a detrimental effect on the trees.
Sometimes, I guess, that these effects are so incrementally small/slow, that they aren’t perceptible in one human lifetime?
In nature, all creature’s fortunes ebb and flow. Populations increase then die back due to overreach/extraction.
Perhaps these fluctuations are the natural rhythms of life.
Civilisations rise and fall. We over exploit till the system can no longer support us.
The world is littered with the ruins of past cultures. The one thing they all have in common is that they all eventually collapse.
On a SFF scale, is it possible to have “no dig” without “imports”?
Or any other system of crop rotations/fallow for that matter?
Closed loops sound great, but are they actually possible? Aquaponics sounds good but does anyone actually make it work without “imputs”?
If not, is overreach and collapse inevitably?
Does medieval farming only worked because famine was part of the equation?
The answer, as usual, is that it’s complicated…
In theoretical terms, no: you cannot remove, say, boron or whatever from a system year after year and expect there to still always be enough boron in the soil.
In practical terms I think it kindof depends how big your system is. After all, where is that boron (or whatever) getting moved to? We aren’t sending it to outer space! Earth is pretty much closed loop in terms of materials.
But “Earth” is a very large system and we don’t grow food everywhere. So just because we can’t really remove nutrients from the planet at scale, doesn’t mean we can actually use nutrients that are flushed away to sea or something.
Different minerals have different cycles; carbon and, say, calcium are accessed differently by plants. Different minerals are present in soils in different amounts.
Some nutrients are able to be replenished “on-site” biologically: carbon and nitrogen, notably, come from the atmosphere. Some plant roots will dig deep into subsoil to “mine” minerals such as potassium or phosphorus. How long that can continue to happen depends partly on how much is there in the first place. Additionally, something being present in soil doesn’t mean it’s present in a form that can be used by plants and animals: if you try to grow tomatoes in high-calcium soil but without the right soil biology in the form of microbes, fungi etc, they might not be able to actually access that calcium.
Whale fall used to be a major carbon sink that also replenished deep ocean floor ecology. We hunted enough whales to mess that up pretty badly. Bird migration was another source of soil fertility and probably still is important, not so much for the nitrogen but for other minerals in their poo. I think we still get Saharan dust storms bringing some minerals to Europe, too.
London’s market garden suburbs were largely dependent on the night soil that got trucked back out of London for maintaining fertility.
Traditionally, intensive agriculture usually developed in river deltas and floodplains where regular deposits of silt improved soil fertility. My paternal grandparents grew up on farms in an area that now doesn’t flood because of a dam; the soil fertility there now has a fairly fixed lifespan.
What to do about all of this?
Recycle as much biological material as you can. This recycling requires a certain amount of water, a certain amount of oxygen, a certain amount of carbon and a certain amount of nitrogen to work well. Those are the “big ones” that you need to get right in your compost piles, whether they are hot piles (higher nitrogen, more bacterial) or cold piles (lower nitrogen, more fungal). If you can do that with strictly in-system inputs then I salute you; I think there are people who manage it, but it is non-trivial, especially in a small space.
I simply don’t have access to enough land to grow all my own compost materials for the level of soil building I’m doing, which is at least partly about getting higher than the floodline rather than plant nutrition. But most of my imports are relatively local.
My own experience is that getting enough carbon is always the big scramble.
I don’t worry about the micronutrients much at all, because nearly all the stuff I’m composting comes from plants, and those plants had enough copper or potassium or whatever to grow or they wouldn’t exist and I wouldn’t be able to compost them, and the biological activity of the composting process will keep those nutrients in relatively bioavailable forms. I bought a bucket of organic potato fertiliser several years ago and sometimes I remember to use it but it doesn’t seem to make a huge difference so I guess my compost is good enough.
I don’t worry about depletion of the soil where I’m getting leaves from, because the street trees in question aren’t growing with a lovely layer of leaf litter to replenish the soil anyway: either I use the leaves or I don’t, but either way those leaves are not going to do any good at all left on the pavement. (The main street I get leaves from is getting all the trees pollarded this summer, though, so this year might be very slim pickings for leaves. Sigh.)
I similarly don’t worry too much about the woodchips. Most of them are coming from gardens where people don’t have space or capacity to accommodate fallen branches or to let logs rot down naturally. Megafauna and maybe fire would have previously been the tree surgeons and brush-clearers of the local ecosystem but the megafauna died out a long time ago and we don’t like fire in residential areas, so instead we maintain tree health by removing limbs and brush with fossil fuels. Absent that energy input we’d have to go back to fire, I think.
I am slightly concerned about the implications of using bulk spent coffee grounds in my compost, because coffee beans are coming from quite far away and I have no idea what soil fertility measures are in place where they are grown. But… the coffee grounds are already here, and they are way too wet and heavy to send back. At least when I compost them I am diverting them from landfill.
We do get horse manure deliveries at the allotment; it’s actually manure mixed with bedding which is itself a mixture of straw and wood shavings and sometimes some coir or expanded clay pellets or whatever. At the Near Allotment I use it quite sparingly as we have had problems with aminopyralid pesticides in the past, and also because deliveries are sporadic and not really sufficient for the number of plot tenants that want to use it. At the Far Allotment I rely on it quite a bit more, because the supply is plentiful and I don’t have anywhere near as much access to leaves and coffee up there.
I make quite sparing use of urine, and currently no use of human faeces, because I do not have the right infrastructure or social support to use them more. I use very small amounts of charcoal/biochar, because burning stuff in London is frowned upon and I have limited access to firewood.
This spring I found some dumped growing medium from, I think, someone’s cannabis grow-op. My peppers and aubergines are looking pretty good, but I wish I could figure out who dumped it and get them to deliver to the allotment instead.
Kathryn wrote: “I suppose another question I have around all this is: if commodities (or at least, extractive models for procuring and exchanging them) are the problem, what is a de-commodified production called?”
Good question … or in fact not only what is it called, but what is its nature? Thanks for the comments around this. Something to come back to, I hope.