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 November 1, 2024 | 102 Comments
Apologies that I’ve been so silent on here of late. Too much going on. My thanks though to Alice for keeping the flame burning here with her guest post – very interesting discussion.
In other news, Jim Thomas has filed this interesting report from COP16 in Cali, and in its budget this week the British government has applied limited inheritance tax for the first time to farmland transfers. Meanwhile, environment secretary Steve Reed has said that farmers and conservationists will have to “learn to do more with less”. Fascinating to see how that one turns out…
More on those perhaps in due course. I’m still under the cosh with other work so posts may remain sporadic, but anyway I’m here now so let’s give something a whirl broadly on the ‘more with less’ front.
So… now that I’ve earned a little carbon credibility by passing up the opportunity to fly to North America for a book tour, it’s time for a confession – we have a tractor and a mini digger on our holding.
Hey, don’t go! I know that as someone who writes about the end of modernity and the fossil fuel age, this news might raise some eyebrows. I mean, you’re welcome to go and find the farmer who stays afloat commercially and makes no use of fossil fuels. But we’re working to cut the diesel guzzlers out of our lives. I’m going to try to explain what’s involved in that and some of the parameters around it in this post.
The impetus for it came from the X account @brightabyss, who wrote:
If you are cultivating food in a good way that still requires tractors, constant inputs of plastics, and loads of fossil fuels you are not doing “agroecology”, “regenerative farming”, or “stewarding the land”. You are just being less destructive.
He added “My comment is not about moralism, but about human scale production & transitioning toward ecological embeddedness and more people labour in food production.”
I basically agree with this. But I’m not gonna lie: the fact that this sometime ivory tower academic can now sit in the digger with the two joysticks in my hand and control its movements without even really thinking about it does give me a certain amount of pleasure. And a lot less backache. Still, I doubt such skillsets will serve humanity long into the future. So, yes, we need to talk about transitioning. But there’s a lot of complexity wrapped up in that, which I don’t think is always well understood in public discussion. I’ll try to encompass some of that complexity in my handy seven-point guide to the agrarian fossil fuel transition below.
First, a sense of proportion. Tractors and diggers on the farm may not be exactly the wave of the future, but in the short-term their energy footprint is generally low compared to many other activities in modern society. We use about a car tankful of diesel and petrol annually in the tractor, digger and other machines for our small market garden and other food and fibre producing activities on our site. Most people I know think nothing of using that much for a recreational weekend trip. So let’s not go too overboard about how unsustainable it is. On our holding and many similar ones I know, our use of fossil fuels is too high, unsustainably high, but compared to many other uses it’s not “loads”, and there are many other areas of modern life with greater priority for fossil fuel belt-tightening.
We have a 1980 Ford 3600 tractor, delivering 45 horsepower at the PTO. That makes it virtually a toy by modern farming standards (somewhat less so when it was made – farm scale has changed a lot, and fast). Even so, it has astonishing power compared to human work output. A fit and motivated person can reportedly sustain a manual work output of 75W. Forty-five horsepower equates to about 33,500W. So, at the touch of a button, our little tractor gives us about 450 farmworkers. I’m definitely onboard with the idea of more people labour in food production, and we do mobilise a bit of local people-power to help us get some jobs done. But it’s hard to summon 450 of them with the turn of a key. So when we talk about transitioning from machine to human labour, it’s worth bearing in mind quite what a jump that could be.
The minimum wage currently is £11.44 per hour. A litre of red agricultural diesel currently averages £0.73 (about half white diesel prices) – call it 80p with delivery and storage costs. Our tractor uses about 10 litres of diesel per hour when it’s working hard – so that’s £8 direct costs for an hour of tractor work. To get the same amount of work done via human labour on the basis of the 1:450 ratio at the minimum wage would cost over £5,000. It’s easy to see why our farming systems prefer machine labour over people labour, and why the transition to the latter might be difficult.
A few further considerations to lob in here. Tractors can do a lot of manual work, but they’re better at some things than others – ploughing and harrowing yes, tying up beans or harvesting cut-and-come-again lettuce leaves, not so much. So mechanisation pushes the farm system toward certain crops and cropping styles that aren’t necessarily the healthiest or lowest footprint.
Also, there’s something to be said for the power of humans working together rather than foot-on-throttle power, but the former just isn’t going to match the latter in pure wattage, however good you are at building work relationships. That’s probably a good thing. There’s a problem of overproduction in global agriculture due to the fact that it’s so easy to produce more food with more foot-on-throttle power – which suits corporations and other state interests, but isn’t so great for ordinary people and other living things. Without that easy recourse to fossils, people will produce less food, more diverse and healthy food and food scaled to local needs. Which would be a fine thing, but expectations would have to change – no more super-cheap ‘buy one get one free’ offers at the supermarket, I’m afraid.
Wage labour of the present kind is unlikely to be the way that the extra people needed in the post-fossil food production will be brought into the system. But their inputs are likely to be structured in various possible ways, some more appealing than others. This needs more attention than it’s currently getting.
As well as the ‘revenue’ energy costs of the fuel, machinery also incurs ‘capital’ or embodied energy costs in its construction and final disposal. When I looked at this some years ago, I concluded that these costs were pretty low for a tractor like mine relative to the revenue costs. That conclusion probably doesn’t hold for the latest high-tech tractors with their proprietary computer systems or, for that matter, for fancy modern cars, regardless of propulsion method.
Anyway, I don’t think embodied energy is a huge deal in strictly energetic terms. But when it comes to the capital costs of machinery, that’s not really to the point. A tractor is a massive embodiment of human and social capital, of techno-legal and techno-social systems, requiring a complex, high-energy, global historical civilisation behind it. It’s easy to imagine future perturbations to those systems that could pull the rug from tractor civilization in most places. As Walter Haugen pithily put it here a while back – “if you’re riding on it, it’s not sustainable”.
…which means if you’re running an agricultural project and use a tractor, a digger or other heavy energetic/hydraulic kit it’s probably best to think of them as short-term gifts that may soon be gone. That in turn means that they’re best used to terraform local food landscapes that will function in lower energy-input systems after their demise, not to terraform landscapes in accordance with the economies of scale presently achievable with big agricultural kit.
When you apply that to existing agri-bioregions it might suggest an almost Biblical ‘first shall be last’ future in respect of the most ‘productive’ existing farmscapes. Top quality agricultural soils are great and all, but there’s going to be a lot of work involved in terraforming them back into diverse and usable small-farm landscapes out of existing big field ag. So … Somerset instead of Lincolnshire? Northern California instead of Iowa?
Of course, simply cutting out the tractor won’t help if instead you import other materials or energies into your system that require heavy fossil-fuelled kit somewhere else. No buying in tons of municipal compost, now!
When you start doing the inventory on this, it gets quite scary quite fast.
A lot of our tractor/digger use is in compost management in relation to materials that come from offsite. So long as we’re selling vegetables onto the open market for the pittance that they command, I’m not massively bothered about paying a pittance for a few litres of diesel to feed machines that do the work of thousands and help us stay afloat in that insane economy. But in the longer term, yes, we need less fossil energy use, and more mixed farming systems involving green manuring and livestock. We’ve been heading in that direction slowly on our holding. I hope the tractor’s days are numbered. I guess all I’ll say on that front is that it’s a good idea not to point the finger too much at food producers themselves for unsustainable production practices. They’re responding to an economic landscape which is largely not of their making. We need to own this society-wide.
All of which is to say that I think @brightabyss is right to suggest we need to work toward ‘more people labour in food production’. But oh boy what trials and tribulations are buried in those few words! Leaving aside the grim economics of trying to make this work in the present fossil-fuelled economy, do not, whatever you do, underestimate the amount of time and emotional labour necessary to coax that 75W out of the people you work with … and out of yourself.
We’ve done quite a bit of experimenting over the years with what works for us and what doesn’t on these fronts. I’ve also written quite a bit about this here before in relation to the histories of family labour, neighbourly collaboration and commons – the lessons of which from past societies we ignore at our peril. Best get started with it now, without starry-eyed assumptions that it’ll all work out just fine or that the inherent urge to collective labour of the proletariat unchained from bourgeois predilections toward private property will carry all before it. I suspect the agrarian societies that figure this out successfully in a post-fossil future will share certain features with agrarian societies of the pre-fossil past, with a lot of emphasis on kin relations and carefully regulated commons.
Which all sounds like a lot of emotional work and friction. To frame it in a soundbite: tractors don’t talk back, which is one reason a lot of people prefer them.
But that’s not entirely true – tractors do talk back in the sense that they break down, usually when you’re just starting on a large and time-critical job. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot to be said for human interaction. Assembling working companions and figuring out ways of working with other people is in many ways the very stuff of life. But a stitch in time with a grease gun and a new fuel filter can save a lot of assembling and figuring. Just saying. Enjoy it while it lasts!
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Good post, Chris. I didn’t check our tax records. But my recollection is that having farmed this land (70 acres originally, 50 acres today) for 25 years is that we have never, in all of that time, used over 100 gallons of diesel in a year. Gasoline usage (for chainsaws, trimmers, and the like) possibly 20 gallons in a busy year.
Now, don’t let us look to close at the gas used in vehicles annually just to go grab beer in the nearby town. Or, haul a steer, hogs, or lambs to market. But the point is that I’m in total agreement, the fossil fuel usage on a small diverse farm is pretty minimal compared to our general usage in the culture at large. The off the farm usage has plenty of commonsense opportunities to trim. It is just that we (collective usage here) can’t be bothered.
Cheers,
Brian
8. Making a living farming
Making a living farming is not easy no matter what type of agriculture you’re involved with. Expenses are high and prices are too low. There is quite a bit of truth in that old saying ‘farmers buy retail and sell wholesale’.
Even being fairly mechanized, labor is our biggest expense. Minimum wage here is $11 per hour (starting in a couple months). A livable wage is $22 an hour. Paying less than a livable wage is immoral. And, by the way, the farmer should also make a livable wage. Adding up the numbers with a few farm workers and you are looking at netting over $100,000 a year. The total that has to be covered by produce sales is much higher with land costs, taxes, insurance, heat, lights, maintenance, seeds, delivery, etc. At the end of the day, it takes a lot of carrots and onions to make a living.
Using a tractor to do the heavy work of tillage and a few couple passes of cultivation is an absolute bargain. Adding harvesting equipment like a mower, small combine or a corn picker makes huge difference, opening up time to do all the hand work that each acre of fresh vegetables requires.
Farmers live in the same world as everyone else and costs are high. We have all gotten used to eating regularly and living indoors. In a future world, where prices reflect the work of growing food, it might be a different story, but for today…
Further things I would be interested in regarding tractors:
– how do they compare to, say, domestic gasoline lawnmowers, which are famously inefficient and polluting due to not being subject to the same regulations as motor vehicles? (I’m not saying you can do the same work with a lawnmower as with a tractor; rather, people who use lawnmowers to maintain ornamental lawns should perhaps not be too accusatory about the fuel efficiency or otherwise of small farms)
– provided you can keep a decent stock of parts (potentially a big “if” but in 1980 there might still have been enough standardisation that it’s plausible…), is there scope for running a tractor like yours on farm-produced biodiesel from e.g. sunflower oil or rapeseed oil? Obviously you’d then need to grow fewer vegetables for market, so perhaps it’s swings and roundabouts.
My major fossil fuel inputs are woodchips and coffee grounds — though I suppose the manure that is occasionally delivered to the allotment sites also counts, given what the grains that fed the horses were grown with. But at the Near Allotment I try not to use too much of the manure: it’s not delivered very often or reliably and so is seen as a scarce resource, and then in 2021 I was affected by aminopyralid contamination. (My subsequent bioremediation attempts worked, but because I tried several at once, I don’t actually know *which* of them worked… and I honestly would rather not have to Do All That Again, thanks.) At the Far Allotment I rely on it more, but I don’t have the coffee grounds available there. That site is substantially smaller, though, with less competition for inputs.
The more I think about it the more I think that without fossil fuels and in a context where I can’t keep livestock, I would need to use more fire for weed control and for processing brush and crop residues.
“if you’re riding on it, it’s not sustainable” — so horses are out, then? I thought the whole point of them was that you could feed them for less grain than their work provides.
Meanwhile, this summer and autumn I have been facing up to the reality that the main limiting factor in how much of my own household’s food I grow is not now land access (though more would help in some ways) but time and space to process and preserve the food I do grow and forage. The cool, damp spring and short summer meant lots of things ripened all at once which would normally spread themselves out a bit more. I’m thinking carefully, as I plan next year’s sowings, about the balance of crops, and how to ensure that I’m never completely overwhelmed with things that Must Be Eaten Now, but still meet household needs for things like tomato passata over the winter. Winter squash are almost no trouble at all in that regard — I don’t have to process them before storing them, just grow them so that the ripening-in-storage times spread out enough that we eat them in a certain order — but there is a limit to just how much squash one household can eat. I missed a trick with the cucumbers this year, bringing them home to pickle or put into salads or whatever when just eating them at the allotment (and carrying that much less drinking water from home — though there is a mains tap at the allotment, it’s a bit of a trek from our plot) would have been far more sensible. Potatoes that were beautiful and smooth three weeks ago had gotten very unhappy about sitting around a week ago and now I am processing those for the freezer just as fast as I can as they’ve gone scabby and broken dormancy — and it turns out they are the least tasty of the varieties I grew, sigh, though still better than some shop potatoes. If I’d had fewer tomatoes and runner beans I would have been able to harvest them sooner. In foraging finds, I have five kilos of medlars to lay out for bletting, and I am hoping that the sorb-apples in a certain park are still there, and after I acquire those I can take the folding scrumping stick out of my panniers for the winter. Hazels were a complete wash-out this year (still not sure whether it was masting behaviour on the part of the bushes, or higher squirrel populations this year), but I did get a few handfuls of chestnuts that were actually worth it, and a decent haul of walnuts.
If I did have access to more land… what I do with it would depend on the land, of course. If it were reasonably open, I would probably try to grow more things that, once dry, can be left in a bucket for a while before threshing and winnowing, or maybe plant an orchard focusing on the early-season things (cherries, yum) and late-season or well-storing crops (quince, medlar, sorb-apples maybe, and some of the better-storing apples and pears would be a priority). If it were woodland I would probably try to find a way to eat what’s already there, but also try some nut trees etc in appropriate clearings.
In terms of embodied energy, I currently need a new shed. The old one does date from at least 1937, but it’s also on the part of the plot that floods the most, was never tall enough for me to stand up inside in the first place, and has nails sticking out of the ceiling. At some stage it was extended (badly), and between that and the water I think it’s only really being held up now by the water butts on either side. I will be sad to see it go, but it will be great to have a better space for tools.
I happen to have a ride on mower , ( $70 at a estate sale ) and a ancient ford 3000 gas tractor 35 horse power , ( $1000 , 19 years ago ) the lawn mower is heavier on gas than the tractor ( gallons burned per hour ) the tractor was built around 1960 so its ” carbon footprint ” for manufacture is miniscule and has run 78000 hours over its lifetime , the lawnmower has a design life of 500 hours .
Hay is the Ford’s main job , cutting hay here is not like the UK ,no one is going to use a scythe all day with temps running around 40 degrees Celsius , air conditioned cabs have saved many from heat stroke , the big round half tonne hay bales have done away with the little squares no one wanted to load and stack them , the old ford happily moves the big round bales , puts them where I want them usually where the land is poorest , the cows poop all around the feeder fertilizing the soil and is moved when there is enough , it helps the ” mob grazing method ” I use .
As for Chris’s man power problem there are 9 people per sq mile in this county , good luck trying to find anyone not busy !
I’m Michael, aka @brightabyss. I really thoughtful and insightful essay, Chris. Thank you for evaluating the conversation by both nuancing and fleshing out some important considerations.
I basically agree with everything you say above, and would add that farmers and producers who want to and are making genuine efforts at transitioning to ecological food production need help, in many ways, and should be supported with massive subsidies and ‘ecosystems services’ payments, and the like. It needs to be a community effort based in prosocial interdependencies. Farmers should never have to shoulder the burdens of cost alone.
I’ll write more of a response and post it on my website asap.
Thank you for all your work.
Hi Michael
I’ll be interested to reading your response when you write it.
I agree with you that farmers shouldn’t have to shoulder the costs of transitioning to less-damaging forms of agriculture on their own. I’m not sure subsidies and “ecosystem services” payments are a good way to achieve this. Such measures are already disproportionately inaccessible to smaller farms growing for local markets. What might be better would be measures to break up huge agricultural conglomerates (Cargill springs to mind as one example) and protect small farmers producing for local markets from having to compete with them.
Taking a longer view, using fossil fuels to get around the frictions inherent in modern grain farming (including synthetic fertiliser use, pesticides, pre-harvest dessicants, giant grain drying machines, and using petrol or diesel to transport the grain around the world) may have this effect anyway as those fossil fuels become more and more expensive. A lot of what we think of as economies of scale are more like economies of throwing-petrol-at-energy-constraints.
To tip the balance in favour of fossil-free farming, we could remove subsidies and discounts for agricultural fuel (sorry Chris, that annual tankful will cost you more) and increase taxes on heavy goods vehicles of all kinds, as well as introducing tolls for the use of some (expensive to build and maintain) large motorways. I don’t think we actually will; if nothing else, the political skill involved in putting such measures in place is not something I’m seeing in our current government. But if we make the huge over-financialised fossil-driven industrial monoculture farms unprofitable, the smaller ones will suddenly have a lot more breathing room.
Great writeup as always Chris, always interesting to see how similar things are across the pond.
We’ve been having similar conversations up here in northern canada regarding liters per hour (but for excavators rather than tractors) and have definitely come to similar conclusions.
On our site there is effectively no water holding capacity unless we dig it, which means hundreds of hours of moving clay by hand, or a half day running a 3 ton excavator for a small pond which will catch runoff and snowmelt.
Same goes for slopes, we have maybe 5 meters of elevation across 20 acres, if we want a south facing slope we have to build it. Similar calculus to the ponds.
So for now we’re treating the excavator lile the miracle that it is, and building as many long term earthworks as possible. If we were to have tried to do all the work it’s done in the last two years by hand we wouldn’t have completed a hundredth of it, and certainly wouldn’t be growing any food.
“We use about a car tankful of diesel and petrol annually in the tractor, digger and other machines… Most people I know think nothing of using that much for a recreational weekend trip.”
Your household also limits its electricity consumption to onsite solar PV, uses composting toilets, and grows much of its food consumption, if I’m not mistaken. So when the household’s consumption is spread out among the people living there, your individual fossil-fueled footprints are relatively minuscule for the Global North.
So if fingers are going to be pointed, they would ideally be pointed at your household’s positive examples.
Further somewhat tangential thoughts:
I suppose one thing that I find attractive about truly small-scale production is that the potential for electric tools seems higher. I don’t think my little 18v electric chainsaw is ‘”sustainable” but I do think of it as a sort of bridging technology, allowing me to learn and practise some skills in the current context, where other members of my household and community are perhaps less inclined to help with manual pollarding and coppicing. Ditto the electric secateurs, strimmer, lawnmower, and drill. All of these but the secateurs run on the same interchangeable 18v batteries.
In a situation of some kind of rapid decline of industrial production, I expect that a lot of people currently employed in keeping that particular show on the road will be a) hungry and b) at a bit of a loose end. But an awful lot of the mechanisation of farming has happened within the last century or maybe century and a half, and we were clearly well up the creek before then.
One issue is that fossil fuel use, or even industrial mechanisation in general, is only one aspect of the system of botched priorities which has gotten us into this mess. I think it’s difficult to address the wider structural issues by giving up your tractor (or my electric secateurs). Using unassisted hand tools will not reclaim the commons or improve land access or guarantee fair prices for producers (or for eaters). The trajectory of enclosure and extraction was set before tractors came on the scene, and phenomena such as bread riots and the smashing of quern stones also pre-date mass mechanisation.
That doesn’t mean that fossil-fuelled agricultural work had no part to play in the positive feedback loop (…or ratchet? Spiral?) of financialised, extractive approaches to production and hang the externalities: quite the contrary. But I suspect changing that system requires more than merely opting out. I wonder whether changing the system is what people are hoping for when they cast around for regenerative/ecological/sustainable/etc approaches — possibly because on some level they recognise how caught up they are in the same unjust ratchet.
The thing about positive feedback systems, even very large ones, is that eventually they play out and come up against hard limits. The system we long to change has to change anyway, eventually; all that is really at question is how much of that change we can implement now in a controlled way, before we absolutely must (a sort of collective “collapse now, before the rush”) and how much of some alternative system we can put into place with the resources we still have so that in the event of rapid decline or localised catastrophe those alternative systems can serve as the seeds of a better system (prefigurative refugia). And of course, even if small tractors on small farms do only small amounts of damage compared to the systems in which they operate and the tools used by the majority of the rich west for less immediately needful activities than growing food, they do still do some damage. So it’s worth ditching the fossil fuels if you can, but it’s also worth, as you suggest, using that tractor to terraform with tractor-free production in mind.
I am thinking today about the loss of agricultural production capacity in Valencia earlier this week, and the loss of connectivity in North Carolina at the end of September. These catastrophes take years to recover from even with what help a global system can offer. They’re going to become more common, too. One major challenge of a small farm future, from my perspective at least, involves preparing for these sorts of events in a world where travel will be slower and more dangerous and supply chains shorter and potentially less responsive. As it is, I am concerned about the knock-on effects on food prices: quite a high percentage (I saw 25% bandied about but haven’t checked it) of fresh produce sold in Northern Europe in winter comes from huge plastic greenhouses in Valencia and it doesn’t sound like it’s even been possible to assess the damage yet. I will be fine with my windowsill greens and my preserves from summer, but less to go around means less to go around and the soup kitchen is reliant on unsaleable veg and fruit. Then there are the potential knock-on effects to things like shelf-stable food processing; I don’t know if this is a big enough event to affect the industrial production of items like pasta sauce in jars or boxes of orange juice, but I do know kids who rely on those for vitamin C. And it’s not like we can go back in time and grow more tomatoes and peppers here to take the pressure off, the lead time is too long.
I imagine that in a small farm future a lot more of Valencia’s produce would stay in Valencia, and the miles of plastic greenhouses would be replaced by something with less plastic and more diversity. I am sure that catastrophic weather on this scale would still wreak havoc and cause great hardship and untimely death. I am not sure what aid would look like. But we are so accustomed, in the modern west, to thinking of food as something that exists in plenty and surplus (with some unjust and unfortunate variations in distribution), that I honestly find it hard to wrap my head around the notion of people starving because of a flood — and I think about this kind of thing more than most people I know. Of course, with the fossil fuel capabilities we have today, if anyone starves it’s because shipping food to them was deemed unprofitable, so some of my incomprehension is really around that. Still, the ability to airlift in crates of provisions will not last forever.
Chris, I’d be curious to know if any of your tractor-enabled terraforming plans involve mitigating against future catastrophic weather events, whether that’s flood mitigation (wetlands Vs drainage?), drought (….wetlands again, I guess), or some other circumstance. It is, of course, impossible to predict exactly what will happen, so any such activities come with the risk of turning out to have been a waste of energy. What a climate-resilient small farm looks like in Somerset will be quite different from what a climate-resilient allotment in east London does (and I could write a whole other comment about the terraforming that literally moved the course of a river, and the mismanagement of commons involved in the rumoured disposal of the legendary drainage pump that was meant to be used when the ditches reached a certain level, and how this means I need a replacement shed because mine, standing since 1937 and presumably not erected in a location that flooded every winter, is really unlikely to survive another alleged “I’ve never seen it flood this badly” period of nornal-for-London winter rain. But that isn’t a climate catastrophe, it’s just small community drama combined with inadvisable hydrology, and I will be putting the new shed on higher ground.)
I disagree that farmers should be subsidized , subsidies get you a glut of some things and shortages of something else , the agro industry controls and milks the subsidy system . Then there is licencing for crops , grow peanuts ( A legume at a government garenteed price) round here you need a licence ensuring the sales of fertilizer to a grain farmer , alfalfa ( another legume ) has no licencing but will not grow round here without irrigation so you need a licence for a irrigation well , get the government out of this and a rotation of grain peanuts and maybe cotton would come into play , government intervention baulks good practice .
There are more people employed by state and federal AG agencies than actual farmers and farmers employ legal specialists to navigate the regulations , dump the lot and let farmers live or die by their own decisions and specialise in what grows best in his/ her area instead of milking subsidies for what grows poorly . it would cause considerable unemployment but in turn would lower taxes .
Poorer countries would benefit by stopping the dumping grains ( A gift from whoever ) encouraging local farmers to produce .
Thanks Chris for putting some numbers (and bullet points) on the topic.
I agree with you in principle, but I think you can’t just divide tractor horsepower by 75 watts to get the human labor equivalent.
I have done some experiments on exactly this subject.
But to start, remember that you can apply that human 75 watts to a bicycle and get about 20 KPH out of the deal. I can tell you that if you put a 75W motor on your bike, it will not move you at all, unless you are pointed downhill.
I just did a quick search, and the smallest e-bike motor I see is 250W. I was going to guess 100W – 200W to get 20 KPH.
I’m not sure why this is the case. I don’t think it is human metabolic efficiency so much as the application ofmuscle power to bone giving the right kind of leverage to make certain movements easier. The human body is very good at slow, leveraged application of force. An electric motor needs a lot of torque to make up for its intrinsic small radius.
So we have reduced your labor force from 450 to about 200, using bike mechanics.
But if we’re talking about grain harvest, I have the numbers.
I’ve done wheat harvesting with a 45 Hp 1961 John Deere 2010 coupled to a 1951 Allis All-Crop combine. 1.5 acres took me about 3 hours of cutting time.
I don’t claim to be any good at this…
But that was after nearly a whole day of cleaning, lubricating and setting up the combine.
So about 2 hours per acre which netted me about 400 pounds of wheat.
Harvesting 1/8 acre by hand took 62 hours for cutting and threshing and winnowing, netting 145 pounds of grain. Admittedly, the 1/8 acre was much better soil than the 1.5 acres, but the yeild was still better than one would expect. I suspect that the combine loses a fair percentage of grain. Maybe because it’s so old…
Anyway, 496 hours (62 x 8) per acre divided by two gives 248 humans to match the machine. Still much less than 450. And I didn’t need to climb under the combine to find those last three grease zerts. Or reach in to the grain bin to scrape out the rat turds.
Which may be one of the better arguments for hand harvest: Much less chance of mixing your grain with grease or bug parts or rat turds or rusty chunks from the machines.
Those 250w electric bicycle motors may well be intended for e-assist rather than for moving the bicycle by only using the motor. But there’s not much in it either way. By law my e-assist stops assisting once I top 25kph; this has the effect that I tend to pootle along at around 24kph unless I’m in a tearing hurry, which is probably a little slower than I go on my (lighter) acoustic bike. But where the e-assist really comes into its own is in acceleration from a stop, so my journeys still take less time even though my usual top speed is a bit slower. I am of course grateful for the e-assist when I am transporting 47kg of pumpkin flesh, or 12 bags of wet leaves, or some other silliness. It’s also awfully nice to have in a headwind.
(I still want a pedal thresher.)
Ha! Well, since my knee tells me that it doesn’t want to stand on a shovel anymore, I’d happily donate my pedal-powered thresher:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/19957900@N03/54112428303/in/dateposted/
But the transportation cost might exceed its value…
Yes, I think transporting something that across an ocean is probably a non-starter.
I would need the saddle higher than that to avoid knee problems, myself.
How about 39 man-hours per tractor-hour equivalent?
I’d say the man-hour per tractor-hour equivalent can depend on the crop, conditions, and specific tasks. A tractor’s rated horsepower is not the same as the power it expends to do any task. And mechanization has greater advantages for doing some tasks, and not so great an advantage for doing some other tasks.
On some small farms, peanut farming reportedly required 480 man-hours per hectare using human power only, or 30 man-hours plus 11.5 tractor-hours, which works out to around 39 man-hours per tractor-hour equivalent.
“In raising ground nut, it was reported that it takes 480 man-hr to cultivate one hectare crop entirely using human power; 311 man-hr and and 53 hr with a pair of oxen using animal drawn equipment; and 30 man-hr and 11.5 tractor-hr using tractor powered equipment (FAO, 1972).”
[quoted from https://koreascience.kr/article/CFKO199311919846135.pdf%5D
I found some snippets of that FAO 1972 document stating that a 45-hp tractor was used for soil preparation, and a 35-hp tractor was used for all other tasks.
The paper linked above also states that “…a human being is rated at about 1/10th of a horse power (hp)” which is the same as Chris’s 75W per person.
…so if tractors aren’t available and there’s a shortage of horses, 10 humans could theoretically take the place of one horse.
Chris wrote, “Forty-five horsepower equates to about 33,500W. So, at the touch of a button, our little tractor gives us about 450 farmworkers… Tractors can do a lot of manual work, but they’re better at some things than others – ploughing and harrowing yes, tying up beans or harvesting cut-and-come-again lettuce leaves, not so much. So mechanisation pushes the farm system toward certain crops and cropping styles that aren’t necessarily the healthiest or lowest footprint.”
I’ll clarify that I agree. The 450 farmworkers equivalent figure is about the maximum which can be summoned at the touch of a button for that tractor, depending on the specifics of the work being done. The 248 calculations from Eric F are good, too, for those specific tasks with his equipment and personal attributes (skill, stamina…)
@Eric F
All Crop combines are the worst to set up and operate. They have close to 100 points that need to be greased regularly. And they tend to shake themselves apart if run at the rated 540 rpm. They are great at cleaning the crop and threshing fragile seeds like dry beans.
I think there was something wrong with your combine if you only got 4 1/2 bushels of wheat per acre. The concave may be rusted out. If the stand was that light you wouldn’t bother harvesting it. By comparison, harvesting cover crop seeds on sandy soil, after taking a vegetable crop, will produce 30 bushels when running a lot of air.
Is the machine on the left in the photo a fanning mill ?
Thanks Greg.
Probably the primary malfunction with that harvest is that I’m quoting yield from memory.
I’m certain of one thing though, the harvest yield was always shockingly bad.
Yes, I’ve seen All-Crops with rusted concaves, but this one didn’t have that problem. Another combine I used had a leak in the re-thresh conveyor – the sheet metal sides had come apart from the wooden back. A surprising amount of grain goes through that re-thresh conveyor.
I’m not sure which machine you are asking about, but the video posted to Kathryn’s comment doesn’t show a fanning mill. Though I do use one for final cleaning.
You may be referring to a table I made, whose top is 1/4″ hardware cloth. I dump the output of the pedal-thresher onto that for a cursory re-thresh:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/19957900@N03/54114499159/in/dateposted/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/19957900@N03/54114434968/in/photostream/
Or if I don’t have more than a few bins to thresh, taking more time on that table can be the whole threshing process. Which has the advantage of separating a good amount of the long straw before winnowing.
The straw that goes through the thresher is so chopped up that most of it passes through the screen.
Oh — I do like the hardware cloth table.
https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Physics-Are-My-Side/dp/1482016869
I read this book by Walter Haugen ten years ago and he sums up my thoughts on what getting to zero entails.
So I have gone through efforts at homemade biodiesel in an old tractor, I even rendered pig fat and turned it into bio. It works but running old equipment comes with lots of other issues , like old clutches, or new tire that cost more than the old tractor. And bio production is messy and you have lots of leftover glycerine to deal with. You can maintain horsepower until your old stuff breaks. I have since switched to a very small electric tractor that struggles with any sort of tilling and I am doing far more heavy work by hand, with a grub hoe.
At some point my little solar/ battery tractor experiment will fail me but it is only the last handle to mechanical slaves I entertain before the day comes when I am reduced to the grub hoe . I have total faith I could feed my family with this one tool. I even believe I could knapp a chert hoe if pressed.
The thing that I don’t know how to replace is the water well pump. Without adequate water I would certainly fail as a gardener here in Southern Calif. From my experience solar electric well pumping technology is way, way more dependable than battery electric tractors and way less expensive but in a very long view pumping water becomes a technology we expect to continue in some BAU fashion that I question.
Locally vintners pump 900 feet to maintain very expensive Pinot noir production but pumping from those depths for food crops is already prohibitive. I have riparian water rights but even shallow water requires some form of power to get into one’s fields. I realize there are retro options but water is potentially more restrictive than power in a powerdown world, at least around here.
I agree re: water being more restrictive, especially if you are in a low rainfall area (or just a low rainfall period of time). Manual pumps do exist (and also require an industrial society to manufacture), otherwise I suspect the best option is an open pit well with a rope and a bucket, preferably on a pulley. Maybe with enough watershed regeneration you’ll get some springs, maybe not.
I’d quite like to build a wind-powered saqiyah but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-3436472927-1990-middle-east-farmer-operates-saqiyah-saqia
I am interested in building a threshing floor or a stone wheel for agave and or olives of similar design. Carving gears is more than I am up for currently.
Seems like a good use for an electric mini bike. Cheaper to run than feeding livestock . Set an automotive transaxle on end if you need to turn a waterwheel Saqiyah.
Having grown both hulled and hull less grains I now know why you need a donkey dragging a heavy sled in circles. It is how you dehull spelt or other hulled grain. Hulless grains can be threshed manually but hulled grains require friction to break the grains loose. Sometimes when the birds show up and hammer your hulless wheat it is nice to have some spelt which can resist bird predation a little better.
Yes — I have some unhulled barley and unhulled oats to try, as well as wheat, but I’m aware that I’ll be depending on the birds not finding it. (Though at my scale, I can just net it…)
All talk of the human equivalents of machine reminds me mostly of Geoffrey Pyke’s genius suggestion for human powered freight trains running on potatoes to get stocks moving immediately after World War Two.
I mean, if you’ve got railway lines and no locomotives you could do worse than a rail draisine…
“As a temporary solution, ‘pending the production of further, and perhaps more appropriate vehicles, Pyke proposed ‘suitably geared bicycle-type structures, though with four wheels, seating 20 to 30 men’. With such ‘Cyclo-Tractors’ on railway tracks, men exerting one-eighth of a horsepower each could move 45 gross ton-miles (30 ton-miles of freight) a head in an eight-hour day, assuming the wagon to be always fully loaded. That is 90 to 110 times the 0.4 to 0.5 ton-miles which a trained man can accomplish […] without any equipment. (Anon, 1945a) Anxious, I imagine, to root his proposal in reality, Pyke created a table showing how many people pedalling Cyclo-Tractors would be needed to get goods moving around the countries of Europe at half their pre-war rates.”
from “Food as Power: An Alternative View”
by Jeremy Cherfas
Dublin Gastronomy Symposium, 2018
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1148&context=dgs
The closest I’ve seen to this is the pedal powered bars that went round central London for a bit, which looked great fun but not for a relaxing beer.
We have a theory that the relatively late coming of pedal power in the industrial revolution and its ability to be distributed (rather than centralised) means it hasn’t been properly explored as small to medium scale machine energy. Thanks for the link.
@Steve L
https://www.velorail.ie/
Already doing it in France.
Though as a tourist activity (for now)
Jeremy’s paper gives Pyke’s specification of 30 ton-miles of freight per person in 8 hours. So I’m imagining one of those 4-person railbikes (with adequate gearing) pulling a trailer holding two tons of freight, moving it 60 miles in 8 hours.
I suppose it’s doable for one bicyclist to similarly pull a trailer loaded with 500 pounds for 60 miles during 8 hours of cycling, if there’s no braking required and the grade is flat and smooth.
@Steve L
I did contemplate hiring one of the rail peddle things whilst on holiday with my family in France.
Decided that by the time we were done for the day, I would be the only one still peddling!!!! 🙂
And what if the people Infront of you are really slow????
You can’t overtake!!!!!
Or the people behind you are elite athletes and you want to stop to take in the view or stop for lunch………..!!!!!!!??????
A correction to my in-head calculations:
Pyke’s specification of 30 ton-miles of freight per person in 8 hours is equivalent to one person moving 1,000 pounds (not 500 pounds) a distance of 60 miles in 8 hours.
I’m imagining pulling a trailer loaded with 20 bags (50 pounds each) of agricultural lime. Or moving 6 medium sized adults (who aren’t pedalling).
1000 pounds, 60 miles, 8 hours…. well, maybe.
1000 pounds is roughly 454 kilos.
My bike trailer is rated for 90kg and I can get another 25kg on a “normal” bike easily enough (more on a cargo bike); a quarter of 454 is roughly 113.5, so a quarter of the load is a reasonable amount for me to pull at once. If I were to split the load into four trips, I could certainly carry that much.
But I can’t cycle 60 miles in two hours when heavily laden like that. 30mph is more like a track cycling speed — flat and smooth and no obstacles and a very lightweight specialist bicycle ridden by a very fit person. I ride a cargo bike and I’m a moderately unfit person, but one who does a reasonable amount of physical labour.
My unassisted speed in urban areas with a heavily-laden trailer and bike is more like 8mph. Granted, some of that is because of stopping and starting and the occasional hill, so call it 10mph if I could do it in one run on a relatively flat surface. That would be six hours to move a quarter of the load, or 24 hours of cycling to move all of it, not counting the return journeys to get the rest of the stuff. I’m not good for cycling more than about eight hours in a day, especially if I’m doing it multiple days in a row while heavily laden, but I’d probably get used to that aspect of it with training. The good thing is that the increase in the fuel I would need to take in to do this is negligible: an extra helping of mashed potatoes at supper and I’d basically have it covered.
So a rail draisine would only need to be three times more efficient than me on a cargo bike to move 1000 pounds 60 miles in 8 hours. That seems plausible, and I bet rail draisines don’t get punctures, either.
It’s probably a moot point for anyone who doesn’t happen to have a disused railway running through their property, of course, but it’s still fun to imagine something like, say, a 200-mile railway loop with some towns on it and various travelling merchants pedalling their way around, clockwise for a couple of turns and then anticlockwise for a couple of turns. They could take the post, too. Or each segment on the loop could have one draisine that goes back and forth between the two adjacent towns and whoever wants to visit the next town pedals there once the cart is full.
We really, really missed a trick when we started using cars.
‘Tractors don’t talk back’ , that made me laugh! Even in the rarefied echelons of the art/activist nexus there is little vocal support for our modest plan. (Many thanks to the insight and support here on Chris’s blog, and many thanks to you Chris for the opportunity to open this idea out, it has been very helpful). There is more interest around AI and gaming (echoes of a Tale of Two CBDs). We had a criticism of it as prepping and that we could end up being no better than Trump’s ‘men with guns’!
This is to say there is no functioning common sense of care in our social spaces and that restoring it is going to be akin to the soil. The biggest hurdle is the paradox of living within a profit making system but needing to transition to a care centered model. These two are diametrically opposed logic systems, and profit is the common sense, completely normalised air that we breath.
We had this from an interested party that we are meeting tonight:
‘We’ve hit upon the necessity to combine interests and passions to establish / develop some form of Farm + Care project which focuses on bringing in some of the 83,000+ care-experienced young people (currently in the system, increasing between 5-10% each year) that are consistently abandoned—not only by the precarity of necro-econonics that may lead their birth family to be unable to care for them, but also the abandonment of duty by the state / ‘corporate parent’.
There’s been a 54% increase in the last 5 years of care leavers facing houselessness. Also, there is no ‘child poverty’ there is only ever poverty – which is always a political choice.’
The artist/activist who wrote this is care experienced and the figures are obviously heart breaking. I’m no purest and will be happy to use whatever is available for as long as is possible and suitable, it is great to see the numbers. The social side of it extends beyond the energy demands of who does what, as I’m sure you agree. These figures show that there are other reasons to get people into communities based in social and ecological care, distributed on the land.
Using an old Ford tractor (or Case or International Harvest, etc.) is not that big a deal in the overall picture. As David Pimentel mentions in one of his articles about real energy costs in growing corn, the timeline for depreciating the embedded energy (or embodied energy for all you Odum fans) of a tractor or combine is 10 years. After that time the energy has been accounted for and you can just calculate the consumptive energy. If your tractor or combine is less than 10 years old, the amount of embedded energy used is approximately the same as the consumptive energy (per Pimentel). This is the real difference between using a walk-behind tiller, which has only about 3% of the embedded energy of a tractor. Same kinds of parts, same kinds of manufacturing processes, but only 3% of the weight of materials. In calculating energy usage, I follow the 5% randomness principle, which has its corroboration in the alpha level of 5% in statistics. (5% is a compromise between Type I and Type II error.) This means that the amount of idling in the field, driving the tractor to the field, etc. is more than the 5% difference between two calculations of energy use. So I use the consumptive energy of a tractor and just double it for the total energy used in my spreadsheets. With a walk-behind tiller, I just use the consumptive energy. The bottom line is that a walk-behind tiller uses half the total energy of a tractor. With your old Ford, your energy use for the work done would be about the same as a walk-behind Grillo or BCS. (Notice how I don’t depreciate the embedded energy of my walk-behind tillers. This is because it makes my calculations more conservative.) Per my experiments over the years and corroborated metrics from other farmers, the amount of fuel used with a tractor is about the same as that for a tiller per square foot, acre, or hectare. One can calculate this usage metric oneself and see if your results square with mine.
The anti-old Ford argument is like the grass-fed beef argument. The scale is so small and the other factors (like community building) so pervasive, that it is really a tempest in a teapot. CAFOS are bad and have a HUGE impact on the ecosystem. Not so much with grass-fed beef. Likewise with using an old tractor to get the first plowing done or even cultivating your corn. Most of the food will be grown with human labor and THAT is the real key to surviving the collapse of global civilization. [I go into plenty more detail in my books if anyone is interested.]
1% of the population are farmers = 99% of the population are not , +- those that garden , how many will starve learning how to grow food ?
We know dieoff will be significant. We have known this for over 50 years. Ecologists like Bill Rees put the reduced population of the earth at less than 1 billion. My farming methods could “possibly” feed 6-8 billion but will never be adopted. The methods of Chris Smaje’s Small Farm Future could feed 6-8 billion, but will never be adopted. Indigenous agriculture already feeds a large segment of the world and could feed more, but will never be allowed to return to previous levels before colonization. Recession, depression and collapse are the patterns of our future. Arguing about it is worthless. Preparing for it is worthwhile.
Thanks for a fine set of responses to this post, as ever. And thanks for responding Michael, and kicking this discussion off. Some quick responses:
Yes, low food prices are a problem, driven in part by the ‘economies of scale’ (really, diseconomies of scale) from mechanization. The need is for higher food prices, higher energy prices, lower land/housing prices etc. as previously discussed here.
No doubt there’s scope for using biodiesel. I used to use chip fat in the tractor, but I don’t think it was great for the engine, and I got through a lot of fuel filters. As per the usual discussions around biofuels, though, I can only see this as a remedial measure on the descent to low-energy localism, not as a way of sustaining the status quo.
I’m interested to hear more about people’s coffee composting experiences. Also not a way of sustaining the status quo, of course!
Kathryn’s point about more use of fire is interesting. Challenging in Britain generally, though. But tillage is less problematic here than in arid places with lighter soils. Burn where it’s hot, dig where it’s not?
I think the riding/sustainability comment refers specifically to machines.
Good point from Kathryn about the importance of processing time/space. Certainly echo that from my experience. And, relatedly, the question of what you do if you have more land available, also bearing in mind storage and time-management issues. The answer most farm societies have hit upon there is livestock.
Probably the same answer to Diogenes’s point about assembling people to produce food in places with low population density. The garden to ranch continuum.
Regarding the subsidy vs anti-monopoly point I’d come down on the side of the anti-monopolists. And also, again, on the side of real food prices. If monopolies of land/housing ownership were also broken up, this would start fitting together. Both food and housing at sensible prices.
Well up the creek before mechanisation: yes, but really a pretty long way downriver compared to where we are now. The main problem back then was that certain societies were already committed politically to paddling upriver. Which is one reason why techno-fix/ecomodernist arguments to keep going further up the creek but with a more sustainable paddle don’t cut it IMO. Apologies for massacring the metaphor.
Agri-fuel subsidies. On a point of fact I use white diesel in my tractor anyway because minimum delivery of red is 500 litres and it doesn’t make sense to buy and store that much for the amount I use (I do have a tank I used to store red diesel in, but now we use it for storing urine from our compost toilet system – I live for the day that diesel thieves pay us a visit). But even if farmers had to pay normal retail diesel prices, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference to my calculations above vis-à-vis manual & mechanical labour. Generally I’m supportive of increasing the price of fossil fuel, but I’m not supportive of making life yet harder for farmers relative to everyone else.
Terraforming on our site: yes we’ve used the digger and tractor for ditch and reservoir making (an ongoing project). Also for building projects, small outbuildings etc which are an important part of terraforming a human-scale agrarian landscape.
And talking of water management, yes this is a big issue worldwide. The Limits to Growth people have pointed out that water is the least substitutable of the inputs into farming and industrial processes, and there’s not enough to go round on present trends. Irrigation and its future is a huge issue.
Thanks to Eric for those figures and to others for the interesting debate around them. It’s useful to establish 450 as the upper limit, with other figures like 200 or 39 as lower ones. I don’t think it changes my overall arguments that much. Average horsepower of farm tractors today is around 170, and a lot of farms have more than one. So we’re still conjuring with a lot of people equivalents.
Thanks also to Walter for those interesting related observations. I’ll try to get to your book soon!
Also an interesting discussion on pedal power. Agree that the late development of cycle power and its quick supersession by ICEs led to a road not taken, which is urgently worth exploring now.
Thanks Joel for the update on your project. It’s sad that people in your networks think of it as prepping/‘men with guns’. How anyone can get from what Alice wrote to that notion beats me, but it shows how far we are from sensible public debate about sustainable agrarianism. Shades of Monbiot likening me to the Nazis!
If I had more space but didn’t have livestock I would use wider plant spacings for annual veg; I might then need to do more weeding but I could water less and make less compost, and try some landracing towards lower maintenance.
My experience composting coffee grounds has been that layering the grounds with (preferably soaked) woodchips (mostly ramial) and leaves and whatever other carbon I can get (shredded paper, cardboard, small amounts of charcoal from the fire barrel) works very well.
The coffee is delivered in sturdy plastic sacks (sadly — but these are at least re-used from delivery of the beans). I stockpile as much woodchip, leaves etc as I reasonably can, then help my Coffee Grounds Guy (who uses a cargo bike to deliver beans to and pick up grounds from a local coffee chain) load up a rental van and unload it again, then build my heaps in pallet bays. It’s fairly heavy work and the older coffee grounds tend to be a bit anaerobic and stinky but it is worth it as the heaps heat right up in a day or so and stay warm for ages. I usually turn them once but sometimes manage twice and sometimes don’t get around to it at all. A proper manure fork (not a digging fork) is crucial. I used to insulate the tops of the piles with bagged leaves but have been informed I am not allowed to steal the bagged street leaves from the council as this counts as “contaminated waste” (I figure it’s no more contaminated than the entire allotment site, which is adjacent to a motorway and receives substantial runoff from pavements etc), so now I just put an extra thick layer of woodchips on top.
This year I built the compost piles in February or March and direct-sowed cucurbits in early April. Winter squash, oilseed pumpkins, cucumbers and watermelons all did great; musk melons didn’t ripen properly but considering we had overnight temperatures of 2°C in the second week of June I’m not surprised (I also had some fungus gnat issues in that bed due to a miscommunication with my spouse about watering). Courgettes got a bit too crowded, also due to miscommunication.
After the squashes are harvested I start distributing compost into/onto raised beds. There is about half as much volume as I started with, maybe a little less, but I had over 100kg of produce out of 7 single-pallet bays and the compost will continue to feed the next year’s crops.
I grow other crops up the “back” side of the pallet bays, in a rotation I haven’t entirely worked out yet. The tomatoes really love it there.
Troubleshooting:
Too much coffee: won’t break down, poor drainage ensues
Too little coffee: doesn’t get quite as hot, especially if the woodchips have been sat around for a while
Leaves too big: form a wet mat and don’t break down; I am considering using a strimmer like an immersion blender to chop them up some.
Woodchip too dry: heap dries out and cools off faster
I have tried growing oyster mushrooms on the heaps, but haven’t got the hang of when to inoculate them so that the oyster spawn isn’t killed by heat but the piles aren’t colonised by other fungi.
I haven’t had problems with rats living in the heaps, probably due to the lack of food waste compared to some of the other compost heaps on neighbouring allotments. I’m sure they’re around, though. I did find a shed snakeskin on top of one of the heaps this spring.
Really I should write a book on this (I have oversimplified the troubleshooting a bit, here) but I haven’t gotten around to it and don’t know the first thing about how to go about pitching such a project.
I imagine you could do better with a) a digger or b) a fancy-pants compost digester thingy, but neither of those are sensible for me on allotment scale.
Here is a little thing to think about in wide vs. narrow spacing. My garden rows are on 1 meter centers so I can cultivate with my 65 cm Grillo tiller, but I use 2.5 foot centers for my dry beans. This is because beans will cross-breed on the 2.5 foot spacing but not at 3 feet or 1 meter. People should not dismiss this idea because beans are “inbreeders” rather than “out breeders.” It depends. Even species barriers are notoriously “leaky.” Witness the mule.
Another interesting mutation I discovered last year was that my Butternut squash (Cucurbita moschata) seemed to crossbreed with my Buttercup squash (Cucurbita maxima). The Butternuts had the same physical characteristics but tasted more like the Buttercups than their usual taste. I planted them out this year and so far, we are getting the same result. This means that the maximas crossbred with the moschatas AND the change is likely “breeding true,” since it is F2. I will know for sure if I get the same result next year.
I suggest everyone reading this invest heavily in landrace crop breeding. I get all kinds of interesting results. When I moved to France, I brought over some of my Yellow Speckled and Purple Speckled dry beans. Over the years they have split out into their parent varieties, as well as some new varieties. The key here is to encourage variability in the seed lines so they have a greater chance of adapting to climate change. This is antithetical to the “pure lines” favored by even the heritage seed breeders. I go into this at length in my books but you can also check out Joseph Lofthouse on YouTube.
I’m already working with the following with an eye to landrace breeding:
– climbing soup peas (with an eye on possible fresh use too)
– climbing French/common beans for drying (again, ideally I want dual-use beans, sorted by size of dried seed)
– runner beans for drying
– blight-resistant tomatoes
– potatoes from True Potato Seed (from BR varieties)
– winter squash (C. maxima and moschata, but not C. pepo as that species has a lot of mixed use and isolating the flowers is a pain when I live two and a half miles away)
– outdoor watermelons
– outdoor musk melons (including types that are good under ripe as a barattiere/cucumber type, and hopefully another population that will ripen outdoors)
– greenhouse musk melons
That’s most of the easy stuff. A lot of these are still at the “gather diverse genetics for your starting grex” stage but it’s enjoyable enough. I also routinely save plum pits, apple seeds etc for seedlings, though my success is very mixed (hungry rodents), and am letting some of my squirrel-planted hazels grow on.
I can’t be bothered just yet with the biennials: growing on a large allotment site where everyone else is growing lots of F1 varieties, I’m concerned about issues with cytoplasmic male sterility, and I don’t really have enough spare netting etc to isolate my populations. (That said, most other plot holders are not letting their biennials flower and go to seed, with the exception of chard that self-seeds everywhere and one old guy who harvests parsnip seeds, so maybe I should just go for it.) And I don’t like most of the brassicas very much, so tend not to bother with them, though I have some kind of self-seeding wasabi rocket here and there, and I am partial to some mustard greens.
My goal with wider spacings would be less need for watering and less need for added fertility in the form of building compost heaps. Probably also more space for edible “weeds” too, though honestly I already do pretty well with self-sown greens.
Good stuff. It is obvious you have the biology background necessary for this stuff. One thing I might add is that bush beans are all right. Many people want to go with pole types because of the greater yield per square foot, but getting on your knees and picking beans is actually quite therapeutic. So is the shucking. I just spent two hours today shucking beans and listening to YouTube financial videos and it was time well spent. (One has to process a lot of chaff to get to the wheat in these videos.) Your points about using wider spacing to conserve water and encourage beneficial weeds are spot on. Good luck.
I use my climbing beans as a windbreak for other plants or to provide shade for sitting in, as well as currently having somewhat limited space, but I do sow a few dwarf drying beans every year too, usually in gaps at the edges of raised beds; they just aren’t my main focus.
I haven’t studied biology formally since highschool, but I have done some reading here and there.
Further thoughts on how I might use more growing space, since “more of the same” would be unsustainable:
I already do a lot of urban foraging, and while some of that is maintained by council employees who come around and cut back the blackberries every so often, or mow the grass, or whatever… some of is rather wilder. I already do things like saving seeds from good individual plants to try and establish them closer to home, and my mushroom trimmings always get reserved to try and spread around, too, and some of the flowers I forage are there because someone happened to drop some seed last spring. The more I garden and forage, the more the lines between my gardening and my foraging blur. So really, with more space I might just do what I’m doing now, but with more focus on “wild farming” (or whatever) the foraged areas. I don’t always like the term food forest (as opposed to mixed orchard) because of some of the baggage that comes with it, but I can absolutely imagine myself starting with ten acres of pasture and turning half of it into a woodlot that I also get quite a lot of food from.
The other consideration is that at this stage “more space” would probably bring greater infrastructure needs. I can’t have a woodstove for home heating now even if I want one, but if I’m in a position later to have such a thing then I’ll need access to a woodlot. A good root cellar would save me some time, as would better solar dehydration facilities, and I don’t have space for either of these now. I could really do with more shed space as it is, especially at home. I can’t have a composting toilet now, but would like to in future (one of the things I find most offensive about city living is using precious drinking water to flush away human excrement), and these also take up space.
Either way, a tenth of an acre of vegetables, including a 12′ by 8′ greenhouse, does seem to be enough space for most of my household’s fruit and veg needs (we still sometimes buy tinned tomatoes and crop failure this year on garlic was a big disappointment but I basically buy almost no fruit, no leaves, no fresh tomatoes or peppers, very few nuts and seeds, no potatoes, few root vegetables etc; and at times of glut I donate substantial amounts of our own produce to the soup kitchen), so “more space” would need to be for the things we currently buy, whether those are “hey you have to heat your house with something” or “you’re going to need more carbs” or “cheese and eggs are really, really nice” or “nobody but you is going to deal with your sewage” or “turns out you don’t absorb non-heme iron, so you can either be completely exhausted forever or take pills or eat a lot of ruminant meat, have fun”.
How to transition from “I have an intensive fruit and vegetable garden and an extensive foraging range” to “more space for gardening but less time, because you’re also farming cereals and maintaining a woodlot and looking after pigs, cows and chickens, and also you aren’t going to forage in parks much any more because it’s the countryside and there aren’t any haha, plus it has taken you twenty years to find this many good spots in east London” is another whole question, especially doing so on a budget. With unlimited funds, I could see myself spending quite a bit of money on things like mulberry trees or walnut trees just to get plants that are nearly old enough to fruit rather than having to wait a decade or two, but realistically I am never going to have unlimited funds, and I also lack space for that kind of tree nursery now.
All of this is probably overthinking things, because if I do end up with access to more land, that land will not be a blank slate. It will have been used before, it will have its own characteristics. I’m probably not going to clear forest to plant potatoes unless there’s no other option; I’m probably not going to leave ten acres with no trees unless there’s no other option. But in reality, the first year in a new space would probably look like “pile up as much brush etc as possible into big compost heaps, plant squashes and potatoes on them, and buy a lot of food while you go for walks every single day to figure out what else is around” — a period of minimal intervention and maximum listening to start out with, to learn how to tend and steward that particular land well, and to learn how it will tend and steward me. A lot of my foraging knowledge is almost intuitive — I can list the factors I am probably paying attention to when I say “time to check such-and-such spot for puffballs” but it doesn’t come to me as logical reasoning, I just get a feeling it’s time to look. I assume that developing that for a new foraging territory will take time, though at least some of it is transferable.
For someone with little experience of gardening and lots of experience of livestock, the opposite approach might make sense: put in a (mobile?) chicken coop first, or a sheepfold, or pig housing, or what have you. Livestock need a lot of infrastructure that’s pretty similar to what humans need, so if you’re dealing with water anyway, making sure you have enough water for your animals makes a lot of sense. But for me the learning I’ve already been able to access is gardening and foraging, and so gardening and foraging would be the best baseline to move out from.
I wouldn’t worry too much about running a tractor Chris.
Use it whilst you still can. It’s manufacture carbon footprint has long been spent.
Buying a shiny new one…….well that’s another story.
Availability of spare parts or fuel will bring it to an end eventually, as I’m finding out with my van.
It’s 23 years old. Needs new brake calipers. They do still exist but tricky to find. 40 day lead time from Just Kampers!!!!!!
Van is a T4 so luckily there is all that campervan/vintage “thing” going on with them, which drives the spare parts market.
(I wonder how easy it is to get spares for a 23 year old Ford Transit or how many are still on the road?)
“Make Hay Whilst The Sun Shines” …………..so to speak. 🙂
At some point, the tractor may get turned into hand tools?
(Inuit peoples made their tools from fallen meteorites.)
On parts availability ,new stuff is worse than old , it just took 7 weeks to get a steering rack for my five year old car , in Brown there is a 11 month old BMW with 486 miles on the clock it ran 2 weeks and has been waiting for parts ever since , and finally a green combine that has just been repossessed that worked 27 hours , no parts , my friend refused to pay for it and they finally collected it from the field it stopped in .
New machinery seems to have a design life just long enough to get it out of the factory gate delivered / sold .
@Diogenese10
Yes, I’m not expecting my new calipers (when they eventually arrive!!!) to last as long.
I’ve had the van for all but the first 5 years of it’s life. So the existing calipers are probably the originals.
I can’t see the new ones lasting 23 years!!!!
Not that I will probably still be driving the van then anyway, due to a whole series of converging circumstances.
Hi All.
Here’s a link to a book on pedal power. (Road less travelled.)
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780878571789/Pedal-Power-Work-Leisure-Transportation-0878571787/plp
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9_QL7uQtcow
Fell over this , a self sufficient homesteader in Brittany France
Great character, lovely film – thanks Diogenese (I see you get a namecheck too!)
Though-provoking post as ever Chris. Regarding this point – “I suspect the agrarian societies that figure this out successfully in a post-fossil future will share certain features with agrarian societies of the pre-fossil past, with a lot of emphasis on kin relations and carefully regulated commons.” – I fully agree, and might only hasten to add that these features still obtain in low fossil fuel agrarian societies of the present, albeit to highly varying, and in many places vanishing, degrees. I’ve spent a lot of time with such societies, in places like Ladakh in the Trans Himalaya, or the Aymara villages around the southern shores of Lake Titicaca, or highlands of Guatemala (needless to confess, I got to these places using an embarrassment of fossil fuels!), where the agriculture is indeed almost entirely done by muscle power of humans and non-human animals. Suffice to say, this is possible precisely because of the kin relations, carefully regulated commons, and integrated livestock as you mention. In Ladakh where I’ve participated in many harvests, reciprocal labor-sharing gets the job done (not only harvesting – also the sowing, tending and processing), where clusters of families and various acquaintances will all converge and pool labor to finish the harvest (barley, wheat, local field peas, mustard seed, others), by hand, of one family, then another after the first is done, and so on until all the fields are cleared. Thereafter follow many stages – field drying of the crop for a few days, hauling the crop with straps backpack-style to a threshing area nearby the house, then further drying in mini-haystacks, then threshing it with lashed-together livestock (cows, dzos, horses – whatever er whoever is at hand), then winnowing it with (hand-made wooden) pitchforks, wind and whistling (to encourage the wind, naturally).
I’ve used the present tense, and while this all still goes on in many villages or households within villages, it is all also diminishing/changing rapidly in the face of roads, urbanisation/out-migration/village emptying, money and the ever multiplying needs for money, ‘development’ schemes, inter alia. To turn to the titular subject of discussion, tractors have started to arrive and appear here and there, but so far to my reckoning, there hasn’t been much uptake. Draft animals and human labor are still, apparently, preferred. Some of this may be due to geography, as many villages are located in narrow side drainages of the Indus Valley and have by necessity small, irregular terraced (tractor-hostile?) fields. Some may be from affection for the draft animals and that way of working. Some may be from the expense of buying or renting and fueling a machine compared to the old moneyless cooperative system.
With an influx of money from things like the booming tourism industry, and the out-migration from the villages, a lot of the human labor for farming is now purchased from seasonal migrants mostly from Nepal and Bihar. (That those laborers find it worthwhile to travel across the Himalayas to do farm work, and that many Ladakhi villagers are able to afford to pay them, speaks to some of the complex economic realities and inequalities today in that part of the world).
The one fossil-fuel-powered machine that has been nearly universally adopted there is the mechanical threshing machine (leaving a lot of livestock in autumn unemployed or liberated depending on perspective). Interestingly though, in that context, the mechanical apparatus represents not a cost savings, but a new and hitherto non-existent monetary expense (by definition, since previously agriculture was subsistence-based, not commercial). I don’t know any farming families that buy and own their own threshing machine. Rather, they rent them by the hour from dealers in bigger towns and the capital city, and accordingly work furiously to get the whole crop threshed as quickly as possible. Villagers still pool labor to do this, now amidst clouds of dust, diesel exhaust, and ear-splitting noise (basically you form a line and pass armloads of barley ceaselessly up and into the insatiable maw of the machine). The main reason cited for switching over to mechanical threshers is time savings (nevermind that even with the old animal-wind based system, everything still got done in plenty good time before first freeze, autumn-winter being a time of festivals, weddings, etc.). But paying for their rental and the fuel has introduced yet another monetary need, itself contributing to the abandonment of the villages for paid employment….
–
On a separate note: Farm Hack (https://farmhack.org/tools) features a number of open-source human-powered farm tools (alongside plenty of high tech but small farm-oriented), as well as the French Cooperative L’Atlier Paysan (https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/julien-reynier-and-fabrice-clerc-from-latelier-paysan-on-self-build-communities-in-farming/2017/03/24), and the Guatemalan cooperative Maya Pedal (http://www.mayapedal.org/machines.en), among others.
I built a modified versions of this:
https://farmhack.org/tools/bicycle-powered-thresher
Here is a blog entry with a couple of pictures before I finished modifying it. Main mod here was alternate power- a 1/4 HP electric motor. Use it while you can!
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2020/07/
The modified version works a bit better. I replaced the beater sticks with a rotating drum with lots of protruding wire loops to flail the grain.
@Steve C
I’m liking the thresher. Good job!!!!!
Do you have a video with the new amendments? Metal loops.
John;
No video, but I should do one. My blog is pretty casual and once in a while, but I’ll see if I can drum up a video.
In the mean time, my drum looks sorta like this, but made of wood with wire loops projecting from it.
https://backtotheland.com/product/wheatthresher/
@steve c
Does the straw get broken up enough to fall through the screen on the bottom ?
Greg;
Man, I need to do a video. Looking at the thresher, you’ll see that there are small windows on the side and top. You grab a hand full of wheat, and with the top closed, just stick the heads in to a window ( more than one person can be doing this, with the multiple windows) to get beaten by the drum loops. Most of the wheat gets released, but some of the heads break off before grain release.
At the bottom of the thresher, the screen ~1/2″ ( 12mm) openings let released grain fall into a removable tray, and the broken off heads and bits of stem stay in the thresher.
So this is a batch process, as once the bottom of the thresher is full, or the tray is full of wheat, you need to stop and clear things.
Most of the wheat stem is never in the thresher, and can be used in other ways.
The wheat in the tray is then winnowed, and the heads above the tray are gathered and given the old “paint mixer in a bucket” treatment to get the remaining grains released, and then winnowed as well. I get a very high percentage of the grain this way.
I hope that is clear enough.
Way slower than an engine driven combine, but faster than flails and winnow baskets.
One of the most tractor friendly crops is soy beans. A couple passes with the cultivator, a walk through to get the survivor weeds and it is an easy crop to keep clean. Besides, any half decent combine will suck in a lambsquarter the size of a small christmas tree and barely hesitate. Clean beans look nice but it isn’t really that important. If the plants are good and dry (starting to shatter) they can be done by hand.
What I’m interested in is getting the most protein into the soy milk for making tofu. Anyone making their own tofu ? Got a method that produces more or richer soy milk ?
I am not making my own, but tempeh instead of tofu would be my go-to if I wanted to maximise protein.
Tofu is very easy to make, a lot like making farm cheese, i.e fool proof. Tempeh requires a starter culture and careful temperature regulation.
We had a long dry fall and I wound up with a lot of split beans. Rather than use them for fertilizer, it seems like a good idea to make them into something. We do buy tempeh so that could be worth a try too.
Tofu protein content will typically follow the protein content of the beans it’s made from. You can simmer your soymilk longer before adding coagulant – essentially de-watering. The film on top of your simmering soymilk is a very high protein product called yuba… which you can skim off and dry for another food product – but this will reduce the protein content of the remaining milk.
But another use of your splits is directly into a soup. Soak the splits just like you would whole beans before making soymilk. You might grind up or puree the softened splits, or just add them to a recipe just like split peas. If you’re still making tofu, you can use the okara for the same purpose… enriching a soup.
Using the whole soy splits instead of split peas gives you much more protein, and more fiber than tofu.
@Clem
I was wondering where you were. Glad to see you are still around !
I really hadn’t considered using the splits as a substitute for peas before. Makes sense. I’ll have to try it, it is soup season.
Is there any difference between grinding the beans dry or after they are soaked ? Grinding dry beans is less of a mess to clean up and if I sift them I can get smaller particles. I have plenty of split beans to play with.
Clem! Good to see you. I hope you’re well.
@Greg
Interesting question… grinding dry or wet. Can’t say I have direct experience – but lets have a go anyway.
Grinding dry would be more difficult in the kitchen, but as you mention it is easier with the right kit. Also in favor of grinding dry is that you can grind far more than you wish to use at the moment and it will keep rather easily (though not as long whole seed). Once you break the seed coat (which has already happened with the splits) you do have to be aware of shelf life. Once you soak the splits you also have a shelf life issue, and it is far shorter.
You can preserve soaked splits like other plant based canning to extend shelf life, but this adds a cost – so dry grinding appears to still have an edge.
Preparing a soup dish from soaked first then grinding should require about the same total time as prep from ground splits, but you have the flexibility of dividing your effort into the soak setup and then soup prep. Dry ground splits could be added directly to a soup base, but will require more cooking time to soften just like rice or other dry grains (buckwheat might be a better comparison than rice).
A couple other concerns have occurred to me…
How clean are your splits? If you have foreign material that is difficult to separate then grinding it in will make it more difficult to clean later. A bit of field dust carrying some microbes is no worry once you boil it. A small piece of soybean stem or pod ground up isn’t going to threaten your existence either. But there are some potential contaminants that might give one pause (grasshopper parts come to mind).
The nutritional difference between a soup prepared from soaked or dry ground splits might be real, but should be relatively small. But here there is another difference we might consider – soaking water temperature. Soaking in boiling water will effectively kill the biology of the splits just as it will for whole seed. Both will still soak up moisture and soften – but with enzymes turned off some minor changes will be stopped. Room temp soaking will allow enzymes to go to work and influence the final product. What the plusses or minuses of these differences are beyond me. A food scientist could help on this front.
Splits don’t have to be part of a grain’s waste stream. And I’m glad you raised the question.
@Greg
When I make soup from beans or peas my process is something like this:
Sunday night after supper: put beans in a bowl and pour plenty of warm water over them
Monday morning after breakfast (so probably 12 hours later): change the water and put the beans, with their fresh water, into the refrigerator
Sometime later that week: chuck the beans (and some new water) into the electric pressure cooker, tell it to cook them for ~20 minutes (depending on the size/toughness of the bean), press start and go away and do something else for a while; The Machine is great because it will automatically start the timer when pressure is attained, and stop cooking after the timer stops, and beep at me again when the pressure drops enough to take the lid off.
Then I add whatever else I want in my soup. If I want the soup to be a purée, I use a stick blender directly in the pan after all the other soup prep is done, if I want little nuggets of bean to chew on I don’t bother with the blender. If I’m making baked beans I check the liquid levels, add the other ingredients (bacon, tomato, onion etc) and tell The Machine to be a slow cooker for a while. If I’m making chilli, ditto but with a different set of ingredients (and I’ll probably sauté the onions in butter with some cumin and smoked paprika in another pan before chucking then in). Either way I come back from a day working outside to a delicious hot meal.
I usually use common beans or runner beans, but I don’t see any reason you couldn’t use soy beans this way. I wouldn’t leave the soaked beans in the refrigerator for more than a week, I think; if I soak them and haven’t cooked them by Saturday I cook them and then freeze the cooked beans, but this is a pretty rare occurrence.
@Greg Reynolds
“Got a method that produces more or richer soy milk ?”
No, but I’ve just discovered a new way of cooking it!!!
Fried in sesame oil until the tofu breaks up into little pieces and then keep going till it goes crispy. Very tasty and crunchy. Bit like fried onion sprinkles.
That sounds really good.
Pressing or mechanical extraction of oil is another subject. Butter is delicious, but if you don’t have a cow…
At our farm we have a Volvo 600, I believe it has around 60 hP in addition I have a quite big backhoeloader built on a Ford structure. Both are more than 40 years old and we use a total of 300-400 liters of diesel per year, most is for digging, drainage etc, terraforming in your speak. Adding some 100 l gasoline for chainsaws and trimmers. I basically agree with your analysis. It should be noted though, that our farm wouldn’t possibly pay for these machines if bought new. So I feel we are somewhat dependent on the ongoing structural change in the farm sector, where these tractors have become obsolete for the bigger guys. Our luck, but perhaps not sustainable.
On embedded energy, I just came accross this article about energy use in corn growing in Ontario and noted that embedded energy in machinery was almost as big as the use for machinery fuel, while energy for dryers and fertilizers was much higher. https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.4141/cjss2013-044
Total use of energy corresponds to 45 liters of oil per ton of corn, if my math is correct (I am writing an article about it and will check it in more detail).
David Pimental published some related numbers for corn (maize), tractors, labor, and draft horses:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Labor and Draft Horses
Raising corn and most other crops by hand requires about 1,200 hours of labor per hectare (nearly 500 hours per acre). Modern mechanization allows farmers to raise a hectare of corn with a time input of only 11 hours, or 110 times less labor time than that required for hand-produced crops. Mechanization requires significant energy for both the production and repair of machinery (about 333,000 kcal/ha) and the diesel and gasoline fuel used for operation (1.4 million kcal/ha).
About one-third of the energy required to produce a hectare of crops is invested in machine operation. Mechanization decreases labor significantly, but does not contribute to increased crop yields.
[Table 2. Energy inputs and costs of corn production per hectare in the United States and potential for reduced energy inputs]
[Total energy inputs for Average corn production = 7,470,000 kcal/ha
[Total energy inputs with Reduced energy inputs = 3,542,000 kcal/ha
[Total caloric content of corn for 9,000 kg/ha yield = 31,612,000 kcal/ha
The reduced energy inputs in table 2 resulted from the following:
Smaller tractors
Less diesel and gasoline used
Legumes used to produce nitrogen instead of commercial nitrogen
Less phosphorus, potassium, and lime were applied, because soil erosion was controlled
No irrigation employed
No insecticides and herbicides applied
Fewer goods were transported to the farm for use
Organic corn production requires mechanization. Economies of scale are still possible with more labor and the use of smaller tractors and other implements. Reports suggest that equipment quantity and size is often in excess for the required tasks. Reducing the number and size of tractors will help increase efficiency and conserve energy.
Hydrogen is the fuel most looked to as a substitute for diesel and gasoline. However, hydrogen is relatively expensive in terms of the energy used to produce, store, and transport it. About 4.2 kcal of energy is required to produce 1 kcal of hydrogen by electrolysis. Diesel and gasoline, in contrast, require 1.12 kcal of oil to produce 1 kcal worth of fuel.
Another proposal has been to return to horses and mules. One horse can contribute to the management of 10 hectares (25 acres) per year. Each horse requires 0.4 ha of pasture and about 225 kg of corn grain. Another 0.6 ha of land is necessary to produce the roughly 1,200 kg of hay needed to sustain each animal. In addition to the manpower required to care for the horses, labor is required to drive the horses during tilling and other farm operations. The farm labor required per hectare would probably increase from 11 hours to between 30 and 40 hours per hectare using draft animal power. An increase in human and animal labor as well as a decrease in fuel-powered machinery is necessary to decrease fossil fuel use in the United States food system.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Reducing Energy Inputs in the Agricultural Production System”
David Pimentel
Monthly Review, July-August 2009
http://robbdavis.pbworks.com/f/8+Reducing+Energy+Inputs+in+the+Agricultural+Production+System+-+Monthly+Review%E2%80%9D.pdf
Going back to the idea of human powered trains.
Railways are not flat and the historic problem with goods trains which in the UK for much of the 20th Century didnt have continuous brakes was keeping them under control on the downhill.
Not far from Chris and I is the old Somerset and Dorset Railway. The 11 7F’s built for the line between 1914 & 1925 kept going until the early 1960’s because they could stop the trains going downhill which more modern loco’s could not.
The thought of Drasine trying to hold back a truck weighing several tons is quite – interesting!
Being only a bear with a small brain, the question I might ask is without machinery might we have grown different crops, handled manure/compost differently etc etc?
For sure, many projectsa with composting have failed when introduced in developing countries where people rely on muscle power, and in general mechanisation has favoured grain as combine harvesters do such an amazing job. Also the balance between household production and commercial farming would be totally different without machinery. Today, it is really no economic benefit whatsover in self provision even of potatoes or vegetables, and even much less of grain. If everybody have to dig and pick potatoes manually, most people would be better off growing their own, providing they have land. etc, etc.
Short answer: yes, probably.
Longer answer: it depends! As a small-scale grower producing mostly for my household’s consumption, I grow a lot of winter squash and a reasonable quantity of potatoes precisely because I don’t have to threshold, winnow and (probably) grind them to get to an edible product. On the other hand, the potatoes only last so many months in storage, and the squash ditto. And they’re useless for large scale commodity trading and difficult to tax and/or redistribute. The machinery for direct growing is only one part of the equation.
“Today,it is really no economic benefit whatsoever in self provision even of potatoes or vegetables, and even much less of grain.”
So yes we could work , even minimum wage, and make more money than if we put those hours into a big garden.
But some nagging desire to feed myself and the confidence I gain in knowing I can do so without any fossil fuel inputs drives the project, for me anyhow. I am kinda old now and even though I could still go find gainful employment my best wage earning days are behind me. Here in Southern Calif. it costs about $1,200 a month to feed a family of two . There is quite a bit of food inflation lately and the grocery bill will increase even as my wage earning potential drops. So if I can feed my family , avoid transport costs usually incurred with a minimum wage job, and cut back massively on my personal carbon footprint doesn’t that equal out somehow the $ decisions of working some mindless job verses a life of farming and subsistence. The trick is you still need money , it has always been so. I can only imagine how much harder this would be to self provision housing , clothes, and heat / cooling , while still enjoying my garden.
And maybe the decisions I make as an old man planning a glide path down aren’t the same as a young man planning decades of his future.
I am in total agreement Bruce. I was just stating a fact of how things are today, not that what I want things to be. We also have a rather high level of selfsufficiency – all vegs and potatoes, dried beans and peas, a lot of fruit, cider, syrup, jams, pickles, reserves, wild foraging, as much cattle meat we can eat. etc. etc.
Hi Bruce, I fully agree with your point of view, and your project. We brought in some potatoes from the garden just yesterday and ate them with the incidental onions and dandelion greens that had gotten mixed in. Delicious.
But I wonder – looking at my expense spreadsheet, I see that food (including restaurant meals) for my wife & I has averaged to about $550 per month this year.
Is it possible that Kansas is that much cheaper than southern California foodwise?
I know about the difference in real estate.
Thanks
Eric , Well maybe I fudged a bit. A family of two in Calif. is a little less than a thousand , a family of three is $1,200.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article284363354.html
We do eat as much as we can from the farm, forage, eggs and pork. I also think a goal of 80% self provision is reasonable so we still have a grocery bill.
Raising feed for the chickens is within my abilities ( I am mostly there) but feeding a pig on forage is still a goal . I need to have way less pigs to really get serious about growing or foraging enough for them and us too. But I am sure it is possible with a serious acorn foraging campaign and maybe two pigs instead of a hundred.
Grains are kinda easy here but require irrigation. Chickens like them. For health reasons my wife needs to avoid grains so acorn flour, buckwheat flour and amaranth flour are more and more of our diets lately. Acorns are the easiest way to get some carbohydrates and if used as a grain replacement one of the healthier choices. I am a big proponent of acorns and they are about as far from tractor agriculture as any crop out there. My chickens hate acorns however and if you are interested in baking without glutens then eggs are irreplacable IMO.
Hello Bruce
Which species of oaks do you gather acorns from for flour?
I’m UK, and our common oak you would not want to eat the acorns due to there high tannin content.
I’m gluten intolerant, and intolerant to oats, and allergic to potatoes too, so finding alternative carbohydrates is an on going challenge. I can grow maize corn, but in a damp northern climate it is not a reliable crop, same with amaranth.
Regards Philip
Phillip, My favorite is Holm Oak. It too needs to be leached to remove tannins but Holm Oaks seem to not be as tannic as many other species. Holm Oak also likes lawns and irrigation which makes collecting acorns on a mown lawn quite easy with a rake and a dustpan. We have several other good species here in Calif. , like the Tan Oak , and Black Oak . Probably not in UK.
I mix acorn flour, buckwheat flour and amaranth flour. Sometimes a little acorn starch helps. I use whipped egg whites for leavening.
The whole challenge of self provisioning changes when you can rake up a couple hundred pounds of acorns in a couple days work. Once dried they last a couple years without degrading.
I use cold water leaching so I can capture acorn starch and separate it from the acorn flour. For Korean cooking of dotorimuk.
Bruce- If you see this- Can you tell us what you are doing to (nearly) feed the chickens from your own land?
That is a challenge I’ve not tried to tackle yet, as it would be difficult without lots of grain production. Note- it is too cold here to do black soldier flies. I am thinking of ramping up worm composting in the recently built greenhouse to get the protein.
$1200 seems a little steep but it is California. In the middle of Minnesota it is easy to drop $150-200 per week at the co-op. Even when we eat a lot of our own food and not a lot of meat.
I do hear you on the value of growing your own food. It is a quality of life choice. Our stuff just tastes better. We are food snobs. So much of what we can buy is simply crap. Tasteless, picked before it is ripe or such low quality we would leave it in the field. We eat our share of tomatoes seconds and peppers with spots but even those are better than what is in the store.
Foregoing fossil fuel does make it harder. A small tractor and a seven foot combine make a world of difference harvesting staples and oil seed crops. Even dry and green bean seeds. Throw in a one row corn picker and a potato digger and you have the basis for a sustainable diet for a small community.
Everything except the combine was available as horse drawn implements. Maybe the corn picker too.
A book from 1916 shows a photo of a grain combine pulled by 28 to 40 horses.
“The combined machine has a thrasher attached, and the grain is cut, thrashed, and bagged, and the bags dropped along the path of the machine, while the straw is distributed over the field. This machine is pulled either by twenty-eight to forty horses (Fig. 136) or by an engine [steam power] (Fig. 137).”
https://books.google.com/books?id=oGdCAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=grain%20combined%20thrashers&pg=PA416#v=onepage&q=grain%20combined%20thrashers&f=false
The Small Grains
By Mark Alfred Carleton, 1916
@Chris
When you say ……
“Which all sounds like a lot of emotional work and friction. To frame it in a soundbite: tractors don’t talk back, which is one reason a lot of people prefer them.”
It got me thinking.
Perhaps fossil fuels have given us the freedom to walk away from difficult/draining/abusive social situations.
Given the choice, we would choose autonomy over compromise.
Living in a fixed geographical place, with a 5 mile radius for most of ones life, could become quite “suffocating”.
As Graeber and Wengrow suggest. The ultimate freedom is the freedom to be able to walk away.
Difficult if your survival is fixed to the land.
Some fascinating discussion threads here – many thanks. I’m sorry I don’t have time to respond as I’d like, but do please keep going.
I just want to say something about a couple of points. In relation to John’s point about fossil fuels giving us the freedom to walk away, I guess that may be true but it’s a seriously mixed blessing. I think it’s also given us something of an inability to engage with difficult and draining relationships, and it’s eroded our ability to create and maintain cultural institutions for dealing with them, culminating in a kind of lonely consumerist individualism that helps replicate current pathologies. I wouldn’t necessarily blame fossil fuels per se entirely for all that, but they’re part of that wider modernist picture.
This relates to Walter’s point: “Recession, depression and collapse are the patterns of our future. Arguing about it is worthless. Preparing for it is worthwhile.” I’d agree with that in the sense that arguing about the likelihood of collapse seems worthless to me, but debating how we respond to it or prepare for it via collective cultural and political institutions doesn’t seem worthless. Preparing in terms of individual livelihood skills is important, but I’d argue the real crux of success or failure is likely to be in the collective culture & politics.
Also, nice to see you here again Clem 🙂
@Chris
” I think it’s also given us something of an inability to engage with difficult and draining relationships, and it’s eroded our ability to create and maintain cultural institutions for dealing with them, culminating in a kind of lonely consumerist individualism that helps replicate current pathologies.”
All true. Every situation has it’s positives and negatives.
Watching my daughter engaging with the “dating game” has been interesting.
She treats relationships like any other (throw away) consumer activity. (Netflix, Music, film, TV, arts etc).
Very quick to move on. She’s brutal. 🙂
But with so much choice out there, why invest time in one person!?!?!
But I can see trouble ahead for her generation.
She is still young though, so perhaps I’m a bit premature to right her and her peers off!!!!
Dating apps connect people but there is always a downside.
I’ve pointed this out to her, which has made her stop and think.
I think the shift from country to town isn’t just one of economics (and is a global phenomenon).
I have friends who love living in bustling cities and would find where I live totally dull.
Its fossil fuels that make all this possible.
Most people I know choose autonomy over communal.
The family unit is about as communal as it gets for them.
Most of the people I know, have chosen not to live near their siblings/parents either. Again, this isn’t just about economics/opportunity. It’s about choice. (I read somewhere, that some hunter gather tribal groups aren’t made up of biological related people)
The initial break up of a Small Farm Past was not through choice, but through necessity, as the industrial revolution took off.
But for us modenistas, we are no longer “tied to the land”.
I’ve got from your writing, that you see a SFF as kin based, with individual “family” units owning a few acres but interacting with neighbours.
I think it’s hard for us in the”West” to imagine anything else.
An Englishman’s home is his castle, after all. 🙂
Very different to, say, the social structures of the pre-Columbian High Andean Plateau.
Best of luck to your daughter in the dating game.
I had a teacher at school who advocated dating widely and quickly, because that was the best way to find out what you actually like, and what things are deal-breakers for you. It’s also a way to begin to understand that the Perfect Person isn’t out there and any lasting and fruitful relationship is going to take work from both people, and a way to tell the difference between someone who is unskilled at relationships but willing to learn, and someone who is unskilled and will blame you for it. In a society where women are so often taught to ignore all kinds of warning signs, I think it was pretty good advice.
I ignored her advice and had one big heartbreak and one small one before marrying my spouse. I never really got on with casual dating, so I didn’t do it. (And for most of my teenage years I wanted to be a spinster cat lady, anyway.)
Unfortunately, living in a different country than my elderly parents does raise some sharp predicaments that I wasn’t thinking about in my 20s.
In relation to John’s point about fossil fuels giving us the freedom to walk away, I guess that may be true but it’s a seriously mixed blessing. I think it’s also given us something of an inability to engage with difficult and draining relationships, and it’s eroded our ability to create and maintain cultural institutions for dealing with them, culminating in a kind of lonely consumerist individualism that helps replicate current pathologies. I wouldn’t necessarily blame fossil fuels per se entirely for all that, but they’re part of that wider modernist picture.
I can’t remember whether I’ve noted here before that the main reason I know people from so many different walks of life is because I go to church. (And one of the things I value about the church that I go to is that we are pretty diverse.) People have all kinds of political preferences or whatever but at the end of the day we exist within linear space-time and that means people live in *places* and that means there is a limit on how far we are willing to go for the purposes of worship and since “worship” can entail all kinds of community activity, I work with people who have very, very different opinions than I do, politically, and I work with people with very different experiences of insecurity, class, culture and so on.
That said, I do pick my battles somewhat on the relationships, and honestly I think we all do. I am called to love everyone who comes to church (and everyone who doesn’t) but that doesn’t mean I am required to like them or agree with them. We still have to figure out how to work together.
Thinking about this further — do fossil fuels truly give us the freedom to walk away? Or do they give us the ability to transform one kind of local problem (whether that might be disagreement over priorities, or serious abuse and coercion) into problems either for people who are complete strangers to us, or who will exist in the future?
I don’t think we can truly sever ourselves from our interconnectedness. We’ve merely used fossil fuels to build an illusion of having done so.
@Kathryn
“I don’t think we can truly sever ourselves from our interconnectedness.”
I totally agree with that. I’m not sure it is possible to survive without other people, in some capacity or another, contributing to ones existence.
But I do think that fossil fuels have given, us lucky ones in the developed world, choices/options/opportunities.
I’ve lived a life that was not available to my parents. On looking back, I feel so lucky to have had the opportunities that I have had. Not that I saw them as that at the time.
(My daughter is off to New Zealand in the new year. Going to work a bit, travel a bit. Happy days. How fortunate for her. A life her great grandparents could only of dreamed of. Not that my daughter sees it as anything unusual or privileged:) as I didn’t when I was doing the same)
I’ve lived a life that is substantially less materially secure than that of either my parents or my grandparents. There are some experiences I’ve had more access to, for sure, and some of the lack of security has been through my own choices (had I stayed in Canada I would probably at least “own” a house or some land by now, subject to a continued ability to pay a mortgage, rather than having spent my entire adult life paying other people’s mortgages for them in the form of rent).
@Kathryn
When I say “the freedom to walk away” I’m not suggesting that people go off and live in a cave, away from the rest of humanity:)
Just that, fossil fuels have allowed people more choices about who they want to live with and who to avoid.
The ability to “find their tribe” so to speak.
Watching this guy at work makes me feel better about the future!!!! 🙂
https://youtu.be/DTrc0qhcr3I?si=0DeDEcCvPuxmTuyJ
In relation to this from John:
“I’ve got from your writing, that you see a SFF as kin based, with individual “family” units owning a few acres but interacting with neighbours.
I think it’s hard for us in the”West” to imagine anything else.
An Englishman’s home is his castle, after all.
Very different to, say, the social structures of the pre-Columbian High Andean Plateau.”
We-ell, roughly something a bit like that. But I disagree that it’s an especially western or English view. Maybe it’s not like the pre-Columbian High Andean Plateau, but private property rights for kin-based households have been widespread throughout agrarian and in some cases non-agrarian history worldwide.
I say more about it in my forthcoming book. I did mention I have a forthcoming book, right?
I look forward to reading the new book.
Without trying to preempt it……
“but private property rights for kin-based households have been widespread throughout agrarian and in some cases non-agrarian history worldwide.”
I would say that, in the “West”, feudalism was the norm until relatively recently?
@Chris
Quit teasing. Tell us about your new book. When is it coming out ?
@Greg, sorry … couldn’t resist. I’ll say more about it in my soon to be published next post. But to answer the ‘when’ question, publication is projected for Autumn 2025. There’s just the small matter of writing it first.
@John. My take on feudalism is that it’s one of those sledgehammer words people use to mean so many different things that it flattens understanding. But even in societies routinely described as feudal there was often a lot of free tenure. There’s also a lot of letter/spirit of the law kind of stuff – as I understand it, land in Britain technically still all belongs to the crown … but not in practice.
By the way, I’ve just ordered the Azby Brown book you’ve mentioned on here. I’m looking forward to reading it.
@Chris
I hope you enjoy all things Edo.
Well…… except the brutal hierarchy!!!!!! 🙂
I guess, it’s all about tenure and rights ultimately. Who care who “owns” the land as long as you can have a 99 year secure tenancy with a token rent.
Spent a while on Harris and Lewis a couple of summers back.
The crofting life is a fascinating history.
Up until the late 1800s, there were no rights for crofters. Evictions could happen without notice and did. (The Clearances).
This meant that crofters had very harsh/basic lives. No-one invested anything but the bare minimum into their crofts because all their efforts could be taken away from them in a moment.
Things improved after some basic tenant rights were introduced in the late 1800s, allowing a modicum of security. (and so, comfort)
When Lord Leverhulme eventually gave up on his plans for the island, he sold off a few bits for private hunting/fishing estates. The crofts He gave over to their occupiers. (He owned the whole island, which is bonkers considering it is the third biggest island in the British Isles after Great Britain and the island of Ireland!!!)
Chiming in very late here – thought-provoking post as ever, thanks Chris. Regarding this point – “I suspect the agrarian societies that figure this out successfully in a post-fossil future will share certain features with agrarian societies of the pre-fossil past, with a lot of emphasis on kin relations and carefully regulated commons.” – I might only hasten to add that these features still obtain in low (if not no) fossil fuel agrarian societies of the present, albeit to highly varying, and in many places vanishing, degrees. I’ve spent a lot of time with such societies, in places like Ladakh in the Trans Himalaya, or the Aymara villages around the southern shores of Lake Titicaca, or highlands of Guatemala (needless to confess, I got to these places on an embarrassment of fossil fuels!), where the agriculture is (or was, till recently) indeed entirely done by muscle power of humans and non-human animals. Suffice to say, this is possible precisely because of Chris’ aforementioned kin relations, carefully regulated commons, and integrated livestock. In Ladakh where I’ve participated in many harvests, reciprocal labor-sharing gets the job done (not only harvesting – also the sowing, tending and processing), where clusters of families will all converge and pool labor to finish the harvest (barley, wheat, local field peas, mustard seed, others), by hand, of one family, then another after the first is done, and so on until all the fields are cleared. Thereafter follow many stages – field drying of the crop for a few days, hauling the crop with straps backpack-style to a threshing area nearby the house, then further drying the crop in mini-haystacks, then threshing it with lashed-together livestock (cows, dzos, horses – whatever er whoever is at hand), then winnowing it with (hand-made wooden) pitchforks, wind and whistling (to encourage the wind, naturally).
(Aside: as for the productivity of this system, geographer Henry Osmaston wrote in Himalayan Buddhist Villages: Environments, Resources, Society and Religious Life in Zangskar, Ladakh: “My own investigations, based on actual crop measurements, show that the outstanding characteristic of the staple grain crops grown in Zangskar [Ladakh] is their ability to produce high yields in a very short growing season .… Specific weight of wheat and barley ranged from 75 to 80 kg/hectolitre (rather higher than is common in the U.K.) …. It is clear that grain yields in Zangskar are much better than most, and nearly as high as those obtained from intensive high input farming in Europe …. the average villager harvests enough grain to supply 4000 kcal/day, well above the original FAO standard energy needs [3,500 kcal/day/worker], and nearly three times as much as the 1500 kcal/day which we think villagers actually eat …. The estimated production is almost embarrassingly high, since it is so much in excess of the estimated requirements of the farming families by internationally accepted standards, and even more in excess of the rather low observed consumption …. Fisher (1985), who surveyed a comparably remote village in north-west Nepal, also found that production appeared to be double consumption, but he managed to account for the excess by considering various sale and barter transactions with outside traders, as well as brewing. Large quantities were stored below ground, one family having enough for over 40 years consumption!” All of this, of course, completely in line with Jim Handy’s book Tiny Engines of Abundance, that Chris previously referred to on this blog.)
I’ve used the present tense, and while this all still goes on in many villages or households within villages, it is all also diminishing/changing rapidly in the face of roads, urbanisation/out-migration/village emptying, money and the ever multiplying needs for money, ‘development’ schemes, inter alia. To turn to the titular subject of discussion, tractors have started to arrive and appear here and there, but so far to my reckoning, there hasn’t been much uptake. Draft animals and human labor are still, apparently, preferred. Some of this may be due to geography, as many villages are located in narrow side drainages of the Indus Valley and have by necessity small, irregular terraced (tractor-hostile?) fields. Some may be from affection for the draft animals and that way of working. Some may be from the expense of buying or renting and fueling a machine compared to the old moneyless cooperative system.
With an influx of money from things like the booming tourism industry, a lot of the human labor is now purchased from seasonal migrants mostly from Nepal and Bihar. (That those laborers find it worthwhile to travel across the Himalayas to do farm work, and that many Ladakhis are able to afford to pay them, speaks to some of the complex economic realities today in that part of South Asia).
The one fossil-fuel-powered machine that has been nearly universally adopted there is the mechanical threshing machine (leaving a lot of livestock unemployed or liberated depending on perspective). Interestingly though, in that context, a mechanical apparatus represents not a cost savings, but a new and hitherto non-existent monetary expense (by definition, since previously agriculture was subsistence-based, not commercial). I don’t know any farming families that buy and own their own threshing machine. Rather, they rent them by the hour from dealers in Leh (the capital), and accordingly work furiously to get the whole crop threshed as quickly as possible. Villagers still pool labor to do this, now amidst clouds of dust, diesel exhaust, and ear-splitting noise. The main reason cited for switching over to mechanical threshers is time savings (nevermind that even with the old animal-wind based system, everything still got done in plenty good time before first freeze, autumn-winter being a time of festivals, weddings, etc.). But paying for their rental has introduced yet another monetary need, itself contributing to the abandonment of the villages for paid employment….
–
On a separate note: Farm Hack (https://farmhack.org/tools) features a number of open-source human-powered farm tools (alongside plenty of high tech but small farm-oriented), as well as the French Cooperative L’Atlier Paysan (https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/julien-reynier-and-fabrice-clerc-from-latelier-paysan-on-self-build-communities-in-farming/2017/03/24), and the Guatemalan cooperative Maya Pedal (http://www.mayapedal.org/machines.en), among others.
@Alex
That’s really interesting stuff.
This bit stood out for me
“it is all also diminishing/changing rapidly in the face of roads, urbanisation/out-migration/village emptying, money and the ever multiplying needs for money, ‘development’ schemes, inter alia.”
Abundant harvests alone aren’t enough to keep people on the land. Given the option of having a bit of the “bright lights” of modernity, people choose to head “into town “.
Thanks for that Alex, very interesting. Hope to come back to some of the points you raise here in due course.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/federal-court-upends-decades-environmental-regulations
Some news you probably have not heard about .
Here’s a thought-provoker par excellence…
“I just cannot shed the certainty,” [Illich] said in an interview with his friend Douglas Lummis, “that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.” This led him to reject “responsibility for health,” conceived as a management of intermeshed systems. How can one be responsible, he asked, for what has neither sense, boundary nor ground? Better to give up such comforting illusions and to live instead in a spirit of self-limitation which he defined as “courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community.”
Excellent essay over at: https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2020/4/8/questions-about-the-current-pandemic-from-the-point-of-view-of-ivan-illich-1
https://slaynews.com/news/uk-government-fund-bill-gates-geoengineering-experiments
Why build solar farms ?