Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on July 8, 2024 | 46 Comments
There’ve been two seismic events in British public life in the last couple of weeks. One was the general election. The other, of course, was the publication anniversary of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. The latter has received strangely little attention compared to the former, so this post is mostly about redressing that balance. But a few opening remarks about the election seem in order, especially insofar as it illustrates some of the themes of Saying NO…
I have to confess I didn’t pay much attention to the election campaign, having concluded long ago that mainstream party politics isn’t where it’s at in terms of the real political questions of our times. But I did get drawn into the drama of the result and ended up staying up all night to watch it.
I suppose it was partly the guilty pleasure of witnessing the uber-wealthy Rishi Sunak’s premiership die in the kind of bare and functional community sports hall he’d never otherwise dream of frequenting, while having to rub shoulders with novelty candidates like Count Binface (a man dressed as a dustbin – 308 votes) and Sir Archibald Stanton of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (99 votes). Talking of monsters, it was also the guilty pleasure of seeing some rather less amusing monsters of our political system’s own recent creation such as Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg meet their political end, at least for now.
But what also visibly died in this election, which is ultimately more interesting, is the idea that mainstream politics retains any capacity to offer bold, attractive and deliverable narratives about the future that capture the public imagination. This is the usual mantra about what political parties need to do to get elected, but instead the Labour Party opted to say as little as possible. Provided they didn’t actively put their foot in it during the campaign, the Labour leadership’s reasoning seemed to go, then the spoils would be theirs. And so it proved, yielding the curious feeling of a government that narrowly squeaked its way to an electoral landslide, largely on the basis that whatever it was, at least it wasn’t the previous government. To watch a huge mauling being handed out with a feather duster felt a bit wrong, but weirdly compelling.
According to one mainstream narrative, the election proved that parties of both the left and right need to pivot to the centre ground to achieve the holy grail of ‘electability’. I think that’s mistaken. Instead, what we’re now beginning to see is that there’s no longer any ‘ground’. The notion that there are distinctive suites of choices and definite solutions to contemporary problems that politicians and technocrats can implement to put us on the road to a brighter future is dying. So long as mainstream politics continues to deny its death, I think we’ll see volatile voting patterns. We’ll also see more political monsters – probably worse ones – emerging to replace the likes of Truss and Rees-Mogg.
All this parallels the arguments of my Saying NO… book in its critique of ecomodernism, a doctrine that involves similar delusions of continuity – a bright vision of a route to a future much like a more perfected version of the present, based on techno-fixes and preservation of the existing economic architecture of state and corporate monopoly. I honestly think the sooner we abandon this kind of thinking and embrace more humble political ambitions grounded in finding least-worst local pathways through intractable contemporary problems the less bad the actual future will turn out to be.
The election has opened the door a tiny bit further onto this alternative politics, but it remains mostly in the shadows. I’d venture to say the same about Saying NO… In its own small way, it raised a bit more awareness about the vapidities of ecomodernist approaches to the food system, but the main targets of my critique didn’t provide much opening for debate, and generally did a good job of using their considerable media muscle to keep the door closed with a ‘There Is No Alternative’ narrative (you can follow some of the twists and turns of this here).
I believe they’re wrong. There is an alternative, but I’ve now achieved about as much as I can by banging my head against the closed door of ecomodernist debate, and it’s time to move on.
Well, almost time to move on. There have been a few new developments and new publications bearing on the issues raised in Saying NO… since it was published. Some new critics and criticisms of the book have also emerged. So, given the anniversary, I’m going to indulge myself with just a little more commentary about the book and its critics. That’s going to involve this retrospective post, split into two parts, followed by a couple of posts that take a deeper dive into two specific issues relating to the book. And then I’ll open the gate onto the new pastures I’ve promised.
One of the new critics I mentioned is Joel Scott-Halkes, of WePlanet, an organisation I criticised in my book under its previous name of RePlanet. On a Tuesday night in June, after a long day building a new hayloft and cutting firewood (unlike politicians, farmers and foresters appreciate the wisdom of preparing for lean times ahead), my ears started burning as my name came up in a talk Joel gave at the Kairos Club in London.
Actually, the most interesting thing in Joel’s talk was the part where he seemed to row back from endorsing manufactured microbial food – hitherto the acme of recent ecomodernist aspiration in the food system – partly for the reasons of corporate monopolization that I critiqued in Saying NO… Microbial food is a corporate/tech-bro dream that I believe has suckered a lot of environmentalists through its pro-nature rhetoric. I’m glad people seem to be waking up to what it’s really about, which isn’t conserving nature.
The part about me in Joel’s talk related to the (contested) claim I mentioned in my book (pp.29-30) that 70 (or 80) percent of food globally comes from small farms. In his reply, Joel said that I was a “bit of a nutter” (albeit “in the nicest way possible” – thank you, sir), opining that while this small farm production point is true, most small-scale farmers have “awful, awful lives”, hate being farmers, and would love not to be. He added that I’m an academic and implied that my farming is something of a hobby, which doesn’t provide a model of what small-scale farming is really like. Proposals for getting from where we are now – with less than 1 percent of people in Britain working as farmers – to a situation where we’re all farmers would involve, he said, some kind of forced redistribution to the countryside, which, according to Joel, is “bonkers”.
Well, I certainly agree that forced redistribution of urban populations to the countryside would be bonkers. I suspect that Joel may not have actually read my book, or spoken much to small-scale farmers around the world and informed himself about their different situations. Still, the ‘miserable life of the small farmer’ is an argument I often encounter, and I’ll say a little more about it shortly. But all in good time. There are seven dimensions of critique in respect of Saying NO… I’m going to discuss in this post and the next one, and it’ll have to wait its turn.
Joel’s remark that my academic status compromises my claims about farming finds its counterpoint among other critics who’ve said that my status as a farmer compromises my claims to scholarship. It’s a fine line to tread when you raise your head above the parapet, it seems.
There’s been quite a lot of this kind of ad hominem in critical responses to the book – I’m an academic, or I’m a farmer, or I’m well fed, or I’m only a sociologist, or whatever. Ultimately what matters is whether what I say stands up to scrutiny.
For the record, I’ve received no salary from any academic organisation (or any other kind of organisation, for that matter) for the past seventeen years. For five years I was a full-time commercial veg grower. These days, when I’m not writing I’m basically a smallholder and general handyman on the farm. I don’t think I’ve ever promoted my farming as exemplary, because it’s too constrained by wider structural forces. I spend a lot of time talking and writing about those forces nowadays, because unless we do something about them – quickly – I think they’re going to bite us on the arse.
But sometimes I wonder why ecomodernist antagonists are so keen to knock my farming practice. When all the talking is done, at least I’ve grown a bit of food for my household and community.
Anyway, call me a hobby farmer if you like. It’s one of the three normative categories of farmer shared across various business-as-usual agrarian narratives, including ecomodernism: hobby farmer (bad), subsistence farmer (bad), proper farmer (good – or at least better). In my experience, a lot of proper farmers are actually hobby farmers, and sometimes near enough subsistence farmers, because the structural constraints on farmers of all kinds are so intense that most of them do it either as a side hustle or an act of desperation. The growth-oriented global political economy is apt to make a hobbyist at best of anyone who tries to step outside it. That goes for writers and analysts too.
Nevertheless, I do identify as a farmer in the sense that I have a basic orientation to making a livelihood (not necessarily a monetary one) from a patch of local land. However compromised my efforts in respect of this are, I think I ‘get’ what’s involved in it in a way many food system commentators really don’t. Ecomodernist narratives about climate, food, livestock, trees, wildness and so on often seem to me to err precisely in that they’re not local and livelihood based, but global and policy based.
One part of my book that’s received no plausible criticism is my claim that protein powder produced by hydrogen-oxidising bacteria involves an energy use of at least 65 kWh per kg protein – much higher than the 17 kWh per kg figure widely circulating in the pro-microbial food literature. As one commenter on X nicely put it, my work in this area has undergone a “thorough peer review” in the sense that it’s been out in the public domain and has not been shot down. At a time when we’re largely failing to decarbonise global electricity generation, and when we need low-carbon electricity for numerous other things, the idea of replacing free, zero-carbon sunlight as the direct energy source for our food in favour of costly generated electricity seems … well, bonkers.
All the same, one of the main pushbacks I’ve received in respect of the book concerns energy – not that I was wrong about the energetic cost of microbial food, but that I was wrong about the impending transition to such an abundance of renewable energy that my energy-based objections to microbial food will become irrelevant.
I concede my discussion of energy futures in the book was limited (but, hey, at least I had an analysis of energy futures unlike some manufactured food proponents!) I’ll try to make amends for that in an upcoming post (I made a preliminary attempt, drawing some further criticisms, here).
Overall, I think the four main problems I raised with a projected future transition to abundant renewable energy (viz. energy trap, hard-to-abate sectors, mineral bottlenecks and time pressures) remain genuine problems. And there are other problems I didn’t mention. More on that anon.
Perhaps it was a strategic error on my part to mention the likelihood of ruralisation and a future turn to agrarianism in Saying NO…. The suggestion that the breakneck global urbanization of the last few decades may not be set in stone for all time seems to provoke outrage among many people. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. I’ll say a bit more about that possible future in my next post. For now, I’ll focus on the present and the ‘awful, awful’ lot of the small farmer I mentioned earlier in relation to Joel Scott-Halkes’s remarks.
First, while I do believe there’s a lot we can learn from small-scale farmers of the past and present, neither I nor any other advocate of agrarian localism I know are fundamentally committed to existing models of small farm society. The main purpose of the ‘80%’ type statistics I mentioned earlier is that they suggest it may be feasible to feed ourselves with low impact local methods. People are too often unaware of the vast and ecocidal overproduction associated with contemporary global agriculture – most importantly of arable crops, and secondarily of livestock. Small, local, low-impact farms can be adequately productive of more nutritious and more diverse crops.
I’ve done some back of the envelope calculations in both my books to show how my own country could feed itself in this way. This has invited a few criticisms, but little of substance that leads me to recant that claim yet (note: saying “just Google it” doesn’t amount to a critique of substance). Given Britain’s high population density and level of urbanisation, if I’m wrong … well, that will only underline how distressing the deurbanization to come might be.
But let me now move directly to Joel Scott-Halkes ‘awful, awful’ lives claim. I don’t dispute that many small-scale farmers do have awful lives, although given that there are well over a billion such farmers worldwide, I think Joel’s remark is … shall we say … something of an over-generalization, redolent of the ‘as everyone knows…’ shibboleths that suck too much air out of contemporary agrarian debate. Instead of breezy generalisations we’d do better to build a more nuanced picture of what affects small farmers, preferably by listening to what they have to say rather than by dismissing their credentials or assimilating them as pawns to a preconceived narrative.
I’m a bit too deep into my farm hobby to do too much face-to-face listening of that kind myself outside my local area, but my son Jake is currently in Bangladesh in the early stages of PhD research into climate, labour and population displacement. Many of the small farmers he’s been talking to there supplement their meagre farming income with seasonal labour migration, or else have lost their farms entirely due to high-modernist infrastructure projects like the construction of embankments that have made their land saline and infertile. Most of these displaced small-scale farmers work as labourers in urban brickyards where, as far as I can see, life is also awful. As I argued in a recent post the Dick Whittington narrative around urbanisation/industrialisation that quitting the farm and moving to the city puts people on the road to easy street isn’t always true. It belies the fact that many among the global poor have awful, awful lives in both their rural and urban manifestations.
I exchanged emails with Jake about Joel’s critique. This is what he wrote:
In my and other people’s experience people describe a desire to farm when displaced to urban areas in lots of different contexts (e.g. Ayeb-Karlsson 2020). There is a growing literature which highlights this in different ways. What people identify as the horror of agrarian lives is often related to the political economy of agrarian life and not the reality of it as a way of living. Dispossessions (debt, land grabbing etc), introduction into the global market (market fluctuations), poor investment in appropriate and resilient technology and all the other f***eries of our time affect farmers more than most. However, they continue to want to farm. A useful way of framing it is challenging the idea that an easier life awaits them in urban areas, pointing to brick kiln work, construction, and international migration, with money from these often reinvested in buying agricultural land and inputs. Equally, often people’s reluctance to do agricultural work is connected to the power structures of agrarian life. In some cases peasant farmers find ways to withdraw labour from rich agrarian employers. This isn’t necessarily that they don’t want to farm. Just that they don’t want to farm for someone else.
So … it’s complicated. As I said, I’ve been out of academia for a while, and I’m not quite sure what Jake’s term “f***eries” means – maybe it’s a bit of social science jargon referring to the strange modern belief that basing a global economic system on the search for profit by the rich is a good way of directing benefits to the poor.
Two other important phrases in Jake’s commentary are ‘political economy’ and ‘global’ or ‘international’ (global market/international migration). As far as I can see from Joel’s presentation, he doesn’t really grasp how the global political economy works – for example in the way that the ‘awful, awful’ lives of many poor small farmers and ex-farmers in the Global South are directly linked to the paltry numbers of people working in agriculture in Global North countries like Britain.
To redress the inequities fuelled by the subsidised and mechanized arable agricultures of the Global North and the immiseration of labour-intensive farmworkers in the Global South I do not suggest that everyone in Britain should be forced to become a small-scale farmer. But I think we should stop deluding ourselves with the notion that being a farmer makes you poor, and its implied corollary that quitting farming makes you rich. It’s not the farming, it’s the politics. Ecomodernism is inherently depoliticising in this way. Political economy goes missing in its problematic emphasis on cheap food, new technologies and the ‘mathematical reality’ of urbanism.
Talking of maths and urbanism, another dimension of critique that’s come my way recently from Cameron Roberts is the greater network efficiency of cities in delivering services, as in the familiar view that it’s easier to live a low-ecological impact life in the city than in the countryside. That may be true in contemporary Britain or other rich countries, but I don’t think it’s inherently true in general. I’ll develop that point in another post. For now, I’ll just say that it’s important to distinguish between efficiency and cost – something that bedevils the whole debate on food futures.
That’s probably enough words for one blog post, so I’ll stop there for now, and pick up the other four categories of critique in my next post.
Jane Jacobs Dark Age Ahead
Anna Jones The Divide
Peter Kropotkin Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow
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Apologies, this is going to be another comment full of tangents.
Jake’s comment reminds me of my paternal grandparents, who both ended up schoolteachers in the suburbs, and grew the vegetable garden that was my own introduction to growing food to eat; and of my father-in-law, who only stopped growing his own vegetables when the exacerbation of a back injury forced him to give it up and who is, at 94, largely supportive of my own allotment efforts (at least, insofar as he’s very happy to eat the produce when we bring it to him)… I don’t think my grandparents really wanted to return to farming, as such, but I don’t think they ever truly left it behind, either. They gardened very differently than I do (as I’ve said before) and from what I can tell when comparing to my memory, I get better yields and grow a wider range of produce (in fairness I also have a much longer growing season), but in the end their reasoning was very similar to mine: the fresh produce from the garden tastes better than anything you can buy in the store, and (if you don’t account for your labour at market rates) it’s also quite a bit cheaper. I think if I were in a position where I couldn’t grow some of my own food I would have a pretty strong desire to get back to doing it, too, simply on taste grounds. On a completely different note I was chatting with a soup kitchen guest yesterday about the election results and brought up the need for better housing, and his immediate response was that it would be great if all social housing came with a space to grow fresh veggies. That probably doesn’t count, for academic purposes, as the “desire to farm” that Jake referred to — but perhaps it’s adjacent. I wonder if some kind of “make it easy for anyone who wants to do so to access land to farm and live on” policy would result in enough small farms to be getting on with, without forcing anyone to move who doesn’t want to. Just about the closest thing we have to that is probably the allotment system, and while allotments are certainly not small farms, the waiting lists in most cities are pretty high.
Network effects and efficiency of delivering goods and services seem to me to be highly dependent on which goods and services are being delivered. Key workers (such as nurses and teachers) in large cities often need assistance finding affordable housing near where they work, and there’s nothing efficient about moving fresh fruit and vegetables long distances instead of growing them closer to where they’ll be eaten (…or eating them closer to where they’re grown, really). I’m sure there are economies of scale that apply in cities as they are now as well as in historical cities, but perhaps we have a tendency to overlook the work that goes into mitigating diseconomies of scale, or indeed to entirely fail to consider that such diseconomies might exist.
I’ve now forgotten in which post or comment you (or someone else?) touched on complexity vs simplicity in resilience… I think it was the idea that the more complex a system is — the more moving parts it has — the greater its susceptibility to sudden, catastrophic failure. I was thinking about this in contrast to my own gardening experience, where there is a lot to be gained from having a good diversity of species both in the food I grow but also in terms of the seeds I sow for pollinators, the materials I put into my compost heaps, and so on and so forth…. so I think this “complex is brittle” axiom is only true if every part of a system has only one function and every function in a system is only carried out by one part. If you get water from a stream, and from a well, and from stored rainwater, then your water system is indeed going to be more complex than if you use only one of those… but it’s also going to be more resilient, as if your well is contaminated you still have the stream and rainwater, or if the stream dries up (presumably because there’s not so much rainwater either) you probably can still use the well for a bit before that goes too. It is definitely more work for me to grow several varieties of tomato than one, even if I have the same number of plants, but it also gives me resilience if some varieties are more susceptible to disease (or just tastier for the deer). One of the troubles with the drive to do everything at a large scale “for efficiency” is that it’s that much harder to implement the kind of redundancy needed in a truly resilient system.
There is also something about speed and latency that I can’t quite articulate. The old saying goes that a station wagon full of hard drives hurtling down the highway has extremely high data bandwidth, but unacceptably high latency compared to even the dial-up internet connections that were available in the era when station wagons were on the way out. That latency matters more for some things (data, lettuces) than others (grains, legumes, wooden furniture).
Meanwhile, it’s the season of “…we’ve got to cut back the hedging in the churchyard because the lack of visibility from the street makes it a very inviting place to do drugs” and I spent some time digging out the old woodchip/leaf pile at the Soup Garden to make space for the new influx. Most of it is about two years old. There are lots of worms. Also lots of bits of wood, still, so I see some quality time with a sieve in my future to sort out next year’s seed starting stuff.
I’m thinking of reading some Murray Bookchin, who keeps coming up one or two anarchist ecological podcasts, and wonder if you have any recommendations.
Improvements like fences, roofs, wells, tractors etc. can be annually written off your taxes if you have a commercial farm, small or large. Almost all small farms require at least one person earn enough income that the write offs balance against the earned income so the farm and the income producing farm members pay no taxes.
If you own a large suburban home on several acres but don’t farm or sell farm products you can also write off improvements, but you have to wait until you sell the property to regain your investments. So people own and sell few head of cattle so they can qualify for the tax benefits.
The person or persons actually doing the labor of farming make little or no profit from their efforts and yes it gets depressing but the farm lives on, the family in general does fine and when you get tired of it land appreciation means you can sell the farm and improvements with a hansom profit. So from the farm workers perspective you can’t have your money until you quit and sell out.
Subsistence farming and being able to feed your family on what the farm produces is a whole different thing, because if their isn’t someone earning an off the farm income and the farm makes no profit either you don’t even get to write off the farm improvements necessary to keep things running.
No new equipment , lots of labor and not really how most farms work.
Farms require off farm income and dedicated farmers can feed their families . Subsistence farming on very small acreage, supplemented by foraging , is also possible but I don’t know anyone who has pulled it off .
I have been a successful small farmer for 25 years because I ( we ) still have the farm, not because I made and profit. The farm is worth a small fortune and I think selling it for something much smaller and attempting total subsistence is a viable option but it comes with the realization that every expense, all taxes and all labor would be payed out of pocket, or from savings. But without working a long time for very little income the final step to subsistence would hardly , for most people , be the improvement I envision.
Subsistence is a challenge to physically pull off , it requires an enormous amount of gardening experience, it doesn’t pay, I still find the notion appealing… My wife, the farm income earner is in her eighties, our income steam to deduct farm expenses against is very small now, the farm will begin to eat into our savings if we try to farm it commercially. So it becomes subsistence or sell. There is no stigma with selling , why the hell would the hard choice of subsistence be viewed with disdain ?
Looks like you have been carigorised as a country bumpkin , you live in the real world and don’t live in the ivory tower echo chamber , how dare a pessant write a book disagreeing with our glorious utopian future !
This article made me think of the victory gardens during the second world war. Apparently Britain needed as much people as possible to grow a part of their own vegetables, because their professional farmers couldnt do it and food imports were declining drastically. Counterintuitively enough british health had increased by the end of the war.
I recommend the book ‘What you food ate’ by David Montgomery and Ann Bikle, they describe this case.
Also I agree with Chris that the politics keeps workers poor, not farming. Unfortunately the solution is therefore also political. While I agree that the for profit nature of large parts of our society, we need our goverments to be more concerned with public purpose. And this is where a better understanding of the monetary system comes in, because as Knapp said: ‘Money is a creature of the state’. When we talk about rich vs. poor, people forget where the money comes from: the state. So if certain people in society have too little money, the state can do something about it, as Covid demonstrated. More reading about this for example Warren Moslers ‘Seven deadly innocent frauds’ or Modern Monetary Theory.
Other factors impacting British health during and after WW2:
– rationing and the associated price controls meant poorer people had better access to decent nutrition than they had during pre-rationing days; things like blackcurrant syrup and later (American) bottle orange juice being available for every child under a certain age, for example, could have made a big difference
– transmission of bovine TB to humans reduced, with increased testing of UK dairy cattle for TB and also with the increased pasteurisation of milk
– tuberculosis mortality started falling, slowly at first and then quite a bit faster, with the development of effective antibiotics (and eventually vaccination)
– the NHS was founded in 1948 and meant many more people had access to health care than previously
None of which is to say that the victory gardens weren’t a factor — I’m sure they were.
The thing about modern monetary theory is that, well, yes, technically the state can create more money and give it to people who need it. But that money still represents a claim on physical resources. Re-distributing the resources is probably harder than re-distributing the money. Creating the money without putting into place some kind of re-distribution mechanism seems like a recipe for the rich getting more of it than the poor do, widening further the gap between the power they have to make claims on needed resources.
Interesting points about public health during and after WW2! I think this part of history is very interesting.
And I agree with you that inequality must be reduced, but if you frame it as redistribution it suggests money is scarce, which it is not.
I’m not proposing the government simply create money to give to people, but the government could create the money and spend it on social programs that are known to decrease inequality (like the NHS or public transport infrastructure and social housing for example). The govt could also put tariffs on agricultural exports and certain imports (like brazilian soy beans) to protect domestic farmers from competition from subsidised foreign commodities. The government could also decide that all public catering ingredients should come from local and organic certified farms if possible, and Modern Monetary Theory teaches us that the state can afford to pay the price for this. This kind of policy would immediately provide local farmers with a steady predictable income if they can secure these contracts to supply the government. Ironically the defense industry is better at making these kinds of deals with the government than the agricultural sector.
Money isn’t scarce, no, or at least, it needs not be; but resources are not infinite. Money only has value insofar as it can be traded for goods and services. Having more money won’t let me purchase more potatoes unless those potatoes actually exist.
I quite agree that government spending could be focused on basic services that reduce inequality. I’m not sure agricultural tariffs do much good unless we produce enough of our own food that we aren’t beholden to other states for the basics of subsistence, which currently we do not; likewise, requiring local procurement of produce for e.g. hospital and school catering is excellent if there is enough local production to meet demand, but this is clearly not always possible. That shouldn’t stop us trying, of course, and I do hope that better (or any!) government investment in both public services and productive local economies will help build resilience, but I’m not convinced that MMT takes into account the possible effects of energy scarcity on ec
Thank you for the reply. MMT is merely a description of how the current monetary system works, so any policies I mentioned were my suggestions.
You mention lack of supply as a potential barrier, but I’m quite sure that local (and possibly new) farmers can start to deliver produce within a year or two if the hospitals, schools, etc put out a call for it. In these discussions it is often forgotten that all resources are created by people, so if there is unemployment, that means there are at least human resources, that have the possibility to create other resources, such as potatoes.
If we are at full employment (like perhaps during WW2) the government can uses taxes, tariffs, rationing etc for freeing up resources (labor and materials).
Mmt doesnt talk about energy, but of course how money is spent on energy matters. And if the state doesnt want its citizens to live in energy poverty, it can direct spending to achieve these goals.
I also believe that we can and should take more activities out of the monetary economy, to decrease overall energy consumption, like growing own food and chopping own firewood for heating and cooking, but some things will stay as they are now, for example I cannot make a solar panel or a mobile phone in my back yard.
Hi ChrisH,
As someone who does a lot of gardening, I can tell you that it probably takes longer than a year or two for someone untrained to go from “no growing experience” to “able to reliably fulfill procurement orders for local hospital cafeterias”. With massive effort on a similar scale to WW2 a fair amount of progress in this direction might be possible, but it didn’t happen overnight in WW2 either — and my understanding is that there was a lot more local procurement to begin with, then, as well as eventually conscription into the Women’s Land Army.
It often seems like the government of the last 14 years hasn’t cared at all whether citizens are in energy poverty, or indeed food poverty or outright homelessness. An awful lot of the people who visit the food bank and soup kitchen I grow veg for don’t have access to any way to cook or heat food, even if they do have housing with kitchen facilities, because they can’t keep their electric and gas meters topped up. I am daring to hope things will improve a bit under Labour but the reality is that it’s difficult not to be beholden to international markets when our own economy is so unproductive in real terms, and it’s difficult for governments invest in things that genuinely improve local capacity for self-provisioning when that means their supporters will lose money. The poor always bear the brunt of that.
There is also the question of access to land to grow all this food. This also affects people’s ability to do the kind of self-provisioning you talk about. I’d love a woodlot and a rocket mass heater, but I rent a 720 square foot two bed terrace in East London with two other people, it isn’t going to happen and even though the rent here is very low for the area (our landlord has moral qualms about landlording) it’s high enough that we haven’t been able to save up to go elsewhere. I do what I can on allotments and other bits of land, and it’s enough to make a big dent in our grocery spending and keep me quite busy — at this time of year I can barely keep up with preserving all that I harvest and that situation won’t let up for several months — but it’s clear that not everyone in London can do the same as I do.
I love the idea of a future with more people using less energy to produce more local food, solar panels everywhere and so on. I do think that non-monetary self-provisioning of at least some consumables goods should play a part in everyone’s planning for the future. I think, with Chris Smaje, that a small farm future of some kind is a best-case scenario and could be quite a congenial society. But I think it’s going to be a bumpy ride to get there.
MMT not including energy in its modelling is a major failure, but one common to other economic models too. For most of human history we have increased the amount of energy we use every year, but it’s important to understand that while human labour is involved in making that energy available, fossil fuels are finite, the materials for building solar and wind electricity are also finite, hydro and nuclear are currently only suitable for particular locations, biomass only grows at a certain rate per year, and none of these methods of producing electricity, heat or motive power are without wider ecological impacts (also not usually included in economic modelling). Those ecological impacts are currently catching up to us fast, making me wonder whether state investment in public infrastructure and services will even be able to keep up. It may be that we have reached a point where increased state expenditure will only allow us to stand still and maintain the status quo.
To those who say small-scale farmers live poor quality lives, I’d say it’s time to talk to larger scale ones.
Having farmed for nearly 45 years in Southern England I’ve watched farm after farm be swallowed up by dwindling numbers of expanding “modern” farmers. What used to be a thoroughly mixed farming area is now largely livestock free (leading to collapse of the critical livestock farming services and infrastructure) with most remaining farm operations becoming arable specialists way over 1000 acres and totally reliant on big machines, big agrochemical inputs, big fossil fuel consumption and huge daily working hours at peak seasons.
Most of even these substantial businesses have one or more “diversifications” that, along with government subsidy, supply the majority of their annual profit.
Are any of them happier? Many are worth more on paper but I’d suggest from the conversations I’ve had that few are as content as their forebears. The phrase that comes to mind is “running to stand still”.
I’m sad but not surprised that this joker got a talk at the Kairos Club (if its the one I’m thinking about). We are in the orbit of these circles here in London, and even on the cutting edge of the ecological movements there remains strong addictions to status, technology and reformism – a kind of ‘hurry up’ incrementalism. We are working on introducing you and your work to this group for this very reason. I understand too well the scientific terminology your son uses; inside the textile and clothing industries of Asia we found similar experiences of people forced off their farms to have to work – wishing to go back.
Should we try and organise a live debate with this guy?
And to the last post, like Wilson from Peasantry School, get an idea of how much you need and we’ll just send the hat round, happy to get involved.
I kinda think that the debate about how miserable small scale farming is or isn’t, is irrelevant.
As energy decline accelerates, there aren’t going to be many other options for vast numbers of people. This is the point ecomodernists miss, with all the wishful thinking.
It may be a miserable existence, but ultimately, it will be the only one.
In Kathryn’s point regarding social housing and a plot to grow veg on……..
My 1930’s council house has an allotment sized back garden for that very reason.
Once upon a time, people saw the need and acted accordingly. Hopefully, in future, it will be a consideration for social housing. (It’s not going to catch on with private housing. You could fit another couple of houses in our back garden and bump up the profit 3 fold.
as in the familiar view that it’s easier to live a low-ecological impact life in the city than in the countryside
This is only true if people in the countryside are affluent and import everything they need, just like people in cities. When country people get all their necessities from the global market economy, everything they use or consume goes through a city first. Stopping the supply chain at the city is always going to use fewer resources.
The level of affluence under consideration makes a big difference. As affluence levels go down, the advantages of country life get bigger and bigger. When we compare the potential for lowest ecological impact and long term sustainability, the city always loses. A family whose supply chains start and end on their own land must have a lower impact than any family in a city.
Energy use is a proven proxy for ecological impact and there is no way to have a lower total energy expenditure than to get all of one’s needed supplies within a short walk and to use muscle power to manufacture household necessities from those supplies (keeping in mind that the root of “manufacture” is “made by hand”).
Constraining energy expenditure to the absolute minimum requires hunting and gathering, but the next step up is subsistence farming. Both these means of provisioning are difficult, but possible, in the country. Nothing about urban life even comes close to the energy efficiency of country life except at very high levels of affluence and very high levels of energy expenditure and, echoing John Adams above, how long is that going to last?
I am wondering wether ” processed ” ” fake ” foods are just another attempt at colonialism .
I talked to a Moslem friend over the weekend and the conversation came round to the fake Mk burger , his Islamic view is no fake meat , period no bug derived food , no fermented whatever they use , and no vaccinations , there 120million or so Moslems that have been told this is not Halal , I doubt you can convince them otherwise .
I agree with Joe, the difference between country and city communities in Europe and UK is cultural at best, and even then they are both serviced by national television and radio stations. They both go to the same supermarkets and utility companies, sometimes the same from nation to nation.
As per my previous comment, even discussion here will suffer from white middle class man-ness; Nick Anim one of the founders of Transition Town Brixton has recently completed a PhD on why the green movement is so white.
Scott- Halkes and his ilk propound a status quo that has never worked for many people and by all measures is now failing most. We do not have to indulge this crass class ass licking based on an incomplete and categorically wrong definition of the world, which is at best time wasting and at worst collaboration.
The model, or working example of a functioning local agrarianism in these nations regions barely exists, and this what we badly need to bring into being.
To qualify this, my experience of working class people here in Lambeth, South London, is that they would love to grow there own food/ are laying down plans to do so and are way more clear sighted about the forces and realities facing us.
We only return to access and rights to land, to self/community provisioning.
I agree that the loss of ‘ground’ is creating a disorientated sense of reality, which allows for the sycophancy of ecomodernist position to masquerade as relevant and even activist – but only in a certain class. In the working class and black cultures of our regions, there has never been a ground politically, so the erzats claims of any political ideology don’t hold water.
Thanks for another fine crop of comments. Briefly:
I appreciated the stories from Kathryn, Bruce and Ian. Also the discussion with Chris about MMT. I’ll maybe say something about the latter another time. It would be wonderful to recapitalise small-scale low-input agriculture, though I guess hard to do presently in a country like Britain even if there were the will to (which politically, there really isn’t, currently), with lots of potential for system gaming. I’d be interested to discuss further the point Ian made about the decline of local mixed farming and the loss that involved. Likewise with Ian’s main point – not bigger and better, but bigger and sadder. Also, I like the way Bruce brings ‘subsistence farming’ back home to the Global North as something worth serious consideration. It is…
Re Bookchin, his writings were voluminous and some perhaps a bit dated now (eg. post-scarcity anarchism) but he was a real pioneer of ecological localism. The only book of his I have and have read is a cheat – The Murray Bookchin Reader. Recommended! I’m currently filling another gap in my education by reading another anarchist pioneer, Peter Kropotkin (it’s tempting to ask why all the radicals, especially Russian ones, were aristocrats, except the answer is painfully obvious…)
@Diogenes – I’d be very happy to join the country bumpkin club if they’ll have me. As I mentioned above, I do think there’s a growing divide between environmentalism grounded in global policy solutioneering and environmentalism grounded in local agrarian practice, and there’s no doubt in my mind which is the better route.
@Joel – to be fair, the Kairos Club invited me to give them a talk, which I did last November – but indeed I think it’d be good for people to try to keep talking across the divide I mentioned in my previous para. Not sure how much I want to keep stepping into that myself as I feel I’ve done quite a bit of it already, with the bruises to show for it. But never say never! I’d be interested to hear more about your friend’s research on environmental whiteness. A pervasive problem, again even more so in the world of policy solutioneering than in worldwide local agrarianism.
@John – thanks for emphasizing the irrelevance of the ‘awful lives’ point. I agree that it’s ultimately about realistic futures, not idealised pasts. As I said in the OP, this notion that agrarian localists romanticise small farm poverty is a figment of the ecomodernist imagination. I’m so tired of having to defend my position against it, but it’s quite foundational to the self-righteousness of the modern age. It also denies air to the view that while some of things we’ve lost certainly weren’t good, others were, and may be worth trying to revive in contemporary form.
@Joe – thanks for that. I’ll be focusing more on that specific issue a few posts down the line, so I hope to pick up that discussion again then
This evening we ate:
– passata from our own tomatoes (bottled in September 2023)
– foraged field puffballs
– homegrown yellow oyster mushrooms
– allotment-grown garlic
– allotment-grown oregano
– allotment-grown tomatoes (this year’s greenhouse ones are doing well)
on (homemade) sourdough pizza bases, with some cheese and heat added. I still don’t have livestock so making my own cheese is out, and the flour for the bases came from a local-ish mill — the grain, obviously, wasn’t grown in London but is at least British.
Then we went and picked some early blackberries from the secret spot nobody else much goes to, and they were so sweet that if you’d put them in a bowl and told me they had added sugar I probably would have believed it. They’re a few weeks earlier there than in most other local bramble patches. On the way I saw that various verges and so on had been mown, but whoever did the mowing went around the flowers that have come up from seed I scattered.
Earlier in the day I started four different jars of fermented veg. After supper I put some beets into the oven to roast. I’m not sure what my housemate will cook tonight (it’s his turn) but I’m pretty sure it will involve yet more of our own veg and probably some things we can’t actually purchase anywhere. We had a ruinous garlic harvest this year so will have to buy some of that soon, which is annoying after a year of eating my own, but I do have some leeks coming on nicely now and there are quite a lot of wild alliums nearby that don’t show up until November or December so I will try and rely more on those this winter.
I won’t claim that we have recovered all that was lost in the various rounds of enclosure and dispossession, but I will assert that there is something of great value, something that can’t be priced in capitalist models, in eating this way. Certainly there is nowhere in London I could go to a restaurant and get food that fresh and seasonal, never mind purchasing the ingredients.
(Yesterday evening… bedtime arrived before I finished my comment!)
Watch ing the world I notice the ex UK prime minister and Frances macron are both merchant bankers , they know the price of everything and the value of nothing , as with the ” poverty stricken peasants , they may not have much money , but they have friends ,family , neighbours that look after each other , help where they can and enrich each others life , they do not have to pay for their “friends ” that will dump them at a moments notice when the money runs out . I would much more be community rich than financially rich !
“merchant banker” isn’t that cockney rhyming slang?
The collective noun for bankers is “wunch”…
LOL lived in the us too long to make the connection !.
Kathryn. With regard to Murray Bookchin, the essay “Ecology and Revolutionary thought” is freely available to download. A good place to start in my opinion.
Thanks Frank — and also Chris.
Regarding the farce that is UK politics…….
I’ve long since realised that politicians are now more interested in celebrity than being law makers.
A particular low was Ed Balls playing a ukulele with Frank Skinner at the Royal Variety Performance infront of the now dead QE2. Some people have no shame.
Bruce Forsyth once said “politics is showbusiness for ugly people”. I think he has a point.
The way I see things playing out is that, like Cuba in the 1990s, people will just start growing their own food. It won’t come from central government.
Those who have the space to do so, will be first.
Back gardens etc.
Then more “vacant” communal spaces will be accessed.
The more people that start to do it, the more people will do it.
Eventually government will see what’s going on and hopefully more land will be made available to meet the need/demand.
M.O.D and CofE would be places where land is going underutilized.
Ecomodernists can sneer at all this quaint peasantry, but people won’t care. The pressing need to feed themselves (and others) will trump any tech wishful thinking.
My understanding is that in Cuba during the Special Period there was a fair amount of central government support for horticulture, though some of it was certainly ad-hoc to begin with.
So, yes — people won’t necessarily wait for the government to tell them to start growing food.
I recall that a number of people took up gardening in 2020, partly because lockdown left them at home for long enough to have time and partly out of concerns about food supply chains. It was quite difficult to buy veg seeds for a while, and I remember splitting up the seed for the Soup Garden
and growing half of it at the allotment while the vicar grew the other half at church, so that if we had theft problems we wouldn’t lose the entire crop.
Detroit is another example from this century of a shift to much more horticulture in an otherwise urban, industrial area. My impression is that the economic decline there was sustained over a number of decades.
@Kathryn
Yes, the documentary I watched on Cuba’s Special Period, said that the government played a central role in freeing up of land for those who would use it to grow crops. Plus providing education for those giving it a go.
(I’m guessing that there isn’t such a thing as private land in Cuba???)
But that people also acted on their own using roof terraces etc to grow food on.
Though the circumstances here in the UK are very different. (Lots of land in private hands) there is still lots of local and central government land out there to be utilized. Plus The Church and Crown before we have to start looking at big private estates etc.
We just aren’t there yet. There is still plenty of food on supermarket shelves at prices that the majority can still afford. But……… this will change. How soon is anyone’s guess, but……it will change.
I hear of more friends and acquaintances in middle class professions, looking to retrain in their late 50’s as their jobs in the discretionary sector are on the way out.
Whether we are “there yet” depends largely on who you are, I think. Ten years ago my church didn’t have a food bank and the soup kitchen was serving eight or ten people once a week. Now we have a food bank and the soup kitchen is feeding sixty to eighty people twice a week. That’s over a tenfold increase in people who are in pretty dire food poverty.
And I am doing my best to grow at least some vegetables on church land!
@Kathryn
I get that for some people, lack of food is an issue right now but…….. that’s a problem of a lack of money/distribution, not a lack of food in absolute terms.
When energy, or the lack of, starts to effect food production and/or imports, then things will start to really ramp up.
@John
When there is a lack of food in absolute terms, how do you think the distribution is likely to shake out?
I don’t know if the richest will even notice.
I certainly wouldn’t like to be a truck driver delivering food to a gated community while all around are hungry , life expectancy would be near non existant .
@Kathryn
“When there is a lack of food in absolute terms, how do you think the distribution is likely to shake out?”
I wouldn’t like to guess but it might not be pretty.
I think people will begin to grow their own food wherever possible.
Thanks for the further comments. I’m short on time (& bandwith, still!) to respond much at the moment, alas, but I hope to be bringing you Part 2 of this essay soon.
Joel’s point about the lack of ‘ground’ in local working class and black cultures interests me. A different but related point perhaps is how widely acknowledged the idea of social collapse and system breakdown is, yet how outside the acceptable framing of the main political narratives.
This relates to Yunkaporta’s observation that indigenous people have already experienced apocalypse and collapsed and in some form survived it. Working class, black, Irish and minority communities share this history of collapse, and continue to exist on a fringe of the ruling structure/culture. It is this history and boundary, lately called precarity, that the ecomodernist middle class professionalists deny, whilst buttressing and aspiring to the oligarchy.
I haven’t looked at Scott-Halkes strategy but rewilding is clearly a kind of code for business as usual for this oligarchy. What could be of interest is the identification of landed gentry, church and local government bodies that hold land be persuaded to lend it for the purposes of local agrarian projects.
To appeal to working class and minority groups with a programme of intersufficiency is to appeal to the common sense that big government and corporations are not here to look after you. Eg. A set of market gardens offering free food to those taking part can alleviate the time constraints of working for food. The complicated dance of stepping out of the rent economy is so grievous that it is almost unimaginable, and is the final rye smile of the ecomodernist oligarch guard.
Things like this make me want to start a monastic community based around e.g. traditional hazel coppicing:
https://www.communionforest.org/
(Probably not going to happen for me so I hope someone else will take the idea and run with it…)
Thanks for the link to the Communion Forest, Kathryn. That brought to mind the inspiration that Graham Pardun draws from the Ethiopian church forests, as in this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/sabbathempire/p/essay-6-the-lily-archipelago
There was an Ethiopian speaker at the St Ethelburga’s event which Chris and I attended a couple of weeks ago, a man who is involved with the church forests. I would have loved to hear more from him than the event format allowed, but one detail that stuck with me is that there are 32,000 of these forests, ranging in size from half an acre to several hundred acres.
If we look at the pure glee of the brexit vote, on some level a collapse of societal norms/capitalist interests, people experiencing oppression from ‘the society’ will welcome its collapse. And to invert it, our society is upheld by the violent collapsing of the society of other peoples, species and ecologies.
There’s collapse and then there’s willful destruction.
Neither are equitably distributed.
And something that may be of interest
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/us-cattle-herd-73-year-lows-retail-beef-prices-record-highs
There goes the cow fart argument .
And another
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/big-wreck-about-happen-intersection-artificial-intelligence-boulevard-and-net-zero-avenue
The US may have to double generation to keep up with AI demand .
I find it interesting that guys like Joel What’shisname are experts on small farm life. You didn’t mention that he spent his life making a living on a small farm and hated it. Maybe because he didn’t. Umm, does that make his comment BS, gaslighting, or simply ignorant?
Maybe be question would be ‘if small farmers are dissatisfied, why ?’ All the small farmers around here love what they do. Small farmers being those who are not primarily Farming the Government to make their living. Even the conventional farmers who have paying jobs in town continue to farm. Clearly that is because they hate it and have awful, awful lives. Right ? How do people who don’t know what they are talking about gain credibility ?
F***eries is a technical term that describes the problems of our times. Trickle down economics being just one of them. Concentration of wealth (and power) is related but different. Climate change. The unstated assumption that continuous growth is possible, even desireable. Access to farm land. Narrow frames. Etc.
Do you ever think about having Jake do a guest post ?
Yes agreed, there’s too much of this speaking for other people with over-confident generalities about what they think, especially when it comes to farming. That there’s sometimes a faint grain of truth to the generalities makes them that much harder to rebut, but I agree that a lot of people show again and again the urge to farm against the odds.
Yeah, maybe I should invite Jake to do a guest post. I mean, a father giving over his public platform for a son to say whatever he likes – what could possibly go wrong?
I can see that Jake could have long standing resentments about being uprooted from a cushy university town life and relocated to a fledgling farm in the middle of nowhere. But as long as you provide a topic and keep control of the Publish button, not much.
Very true. Well, I’ll put it to him…