The Small Farm Future Blog

Siren song: digging into the lure of food ecomodernism

Posted on December 7, 2025 | 8 Comments

I’ve been having an interesting offline debate recently with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the excellent Do the Math blog. I’ll write about it in my next post. In essence, Tom is more certain than I am that human agricultural civilization is a busted flush. Since I generally get it in the neck for my doominess on this point, it’s nice to be in discussion with someone who’s further down that line – especially when it’s as interesting and friendly as the one I’ve had with Tom.

But in this post I’m going to mention a different interlocutor – one who now seems to sit on the more usual ‘we can sort this with tech’ side of the line and with whom the ‘debate’, if that’s what you could call it, hasn’t been friendly at all. While I’ve tried swearing off further engagement with the writing of George Monbiot, a recent Guardian article of his is such a perfect microcosm of the difficulties and dangers of ecomodernism (more on that term below) as applied to the food system that I think it merits attention.

For the most part, I’m not going to dive too deeply into the details of George’s argument and evidence here – I’ve done that before, to little avail. It’s more useful, I think, to look at the article as a piece of literature or rhetoric, and tune in to the story it wants to tell.

I’d parse that story as follows. There’s a problem with agriculture – it’s something quite technical, to do with a trade-off between crop yields and environmental impact. There’s a farmer near Oxford called Tolly who miraculously seems to have solved this problem and “found the holy grail of agriculture” – high yields and low impacts. His solution involves soil management which somehow affects the behaviour of soil bacteria, but nobody quite understands how he’s done it. If we could characterise soils more scientifically, then maybe this holy grail could be replicated and scaled up – but how can we do that? George meets a scientist for a drink in a pub in Oxford and it emerges from their conversation that there might be a way. The results are (literally) seismic.

“We stared at each other. Time seemed to stall. Could this really be true?”

With $4 million of start-up money from the Bezos Earth Fund George and two colleagues (a seismologist and a soil scientist) have developed a way of ‘seeing’ soil. The technology they needed for this was initially expensive, but allegedly should ultimately be zero cost, and they’ve started building the AI and machine learning tools they need. So far, George says, they’ve measured the volume of a peat bog more accurately (“The implications for estimating carbon stocks are enormous”). Eventually they hope that the technology will give farmers an almost instant readout from their soil that will help protect soil health and resilience, and ultimately help everyone find the high yield/low impact holy grail like Tolly.

That, in a nutshell, is the story. I will now comment on some of its elements.

There are essentially no politics or food system economics in this story. There are only apparently technical problems like yields and impacts, which can be addressed through technical means (the frame of analysis is entirely single farm scale, not food system scale). George has elsewhere defined ecomodernism as “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change”. If there are political or economic changes that could beneficially be made to improve the food and farming system – and I believe there are many – then this article is squarely ecomodernist in his terms. I believe it’s important to understand the evasion of politics that this kind of ecomodernist writing about food and the food system involves.

I’m not going to get into the detail here of where politics and economics meets the technicalities of farming at the individual farm and the farm system level. I’ve written a lot about it previously, as have many others. Generally, we have to understand the global farming system as a profit-driven one characterized by the overproduction of most food commodities, and global political systems as ones that inflict scarcity and lack of food and other entitlements upon many people. This means that high yields and low food prices often don’t benefit nature or consumers, especially poor consumers.

So it’s a lot more complicated than George implies in his article. The fact that high yields don’t necessarily benefit nature and low food prices don’t necessarily benefit consumers (including poor consumers) may be a bit counterintuitive, but it’s nevertheless well understood within food system scholarship (one clue to how it works is that farmers and food system workers are essentially the largest category of workers globally, and they are disproportionately poor). The people that high yields and low food prices definitely do benefit are the (usually corporate) providers of yield-boosting farm inputs and retail food distribution systems.

I’ve given up trying to have a reasoned debate with George and with ecomodernists generally about these points, although they’re important. I don’t think reasoned understanding of the food system is the name of the ecomodernist game. Whatever the underlying intentions of ecomodernist authors when they write about the food system, which I’m sure are many and varied, I believe their depoliticizations effectively support the status quo of overproduction, hunger and corporate control.

Moving on in the story, we come to Tolly. He’s a brilliant veg grower who’s influenced me a lot, but he hasn’t found the holy grail of agriculture. His approach is essentially the long-established one of mixed or ley farming. Historically, farmers have mostly done this by alternating crops and livestock. Modern farmers like Tolly can do it with tractors and without livestock if they choose. It amounts to much the same thing.

Most thoughtful people who’ve spent any time around the sharp end of food production and its ineluctable trade-offs treat the latest hosannas in the press about having found the holy grail of agriculture with a resigned eye roll. As shown by the likes of food system analyst Glenn Davis Stone (The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World), these hosannas are usually sung loudest by people who have new commercial inputs they want to bring to market, and are ultimately aimed at the governments or venture capitalists they think might fund them.

A few years back, such hosannas were being sung for bacterial protein (“food from thin air”). The prohibitive energetic and other costs of this technology were always going to stymie it as a viable mass food approach, and venture capital now seems to have deserted it for sexier new fields like AI. I can’t help noticing how prominent these fads are in George’s writing on food – from bacterial protein in his book Regenesis, to AI in his latest article. And also how his fiercely expressed opposition to neoliberalism and gloves-off capitalism in his political writing seems to go missing when he writes about food. Money from the Bezos Fund “may cause some discomfort”, George writes “but our experience has been entirely positive: the fund has helped us do exactly what we want”. This isn’t the hardest-hitting critique of techno-capitalism and the source of its funds you’ll ever hear.

An article on the Bezos Fund’s website about the project suggests that the techniques it’s developing will unlock “new ways to finance climate solutions, allowing transparent measurement and verification for soil carbon markets. This is how we can feed the world without devouring the planet”.  That last sentence echoes the subtitle of George’s Regenesis book, while the preceding one reveals a commitment to achieving it through the existing mechanisms of large-scale global capitalism. George builds his article out from a desire to spread the successful practice of a small-scale local veg grower, but perhaps this obscures what the project’s funders are really looking for.

I’ll pass as quickly as possible over the next part of the story, involving men staring at each other meaningfully in Oxford pubs. My guess is that if you could do a rank ordering of the venues historically where white guys have been apt to congratulate themselves for solving the problems of the world, then pubs in Oxford would come pretty high on the list – and I say this as a white guy from near Oxford who loves to put the world to rights over a pint.

Walter Haugen got straight to the point about what guys like us really ought to be doing to solve the problems of the world: “You – the human engine that has a very low energy input/output ratio – need to get off your dead ass and actually grow some food using hand methods driven by the creativity of your grotesquely enlarged primate brain.” Here, Walter touches uncomfortably on my own central contradiction, in which my efforts to grow more food are continually stymied by my Oxford pub syndrome that makes me think I might be more help to the world by writing articles like this about, well, the dangers of the Oxford pub syndrome. Do let me know if you’ve found this post useful so that I can adjust my priorities accordingly.

Anyway, one way or another this brings us to the crux of George’s article. What, practically, does the technology he’s working on actually achieve? He says that it’s measured the volume of a peat bog (called Whixall Moss), although the paper he cites in support of this says only that the bog’s depth was measured across an eighteen metre line using ten sensors, and that “it is not possible to extrapolate from this single line to an alternative peat volume for the entirety of Whixall moss” (George’s implication that his team surpassed in 45 minutes what fifty years of preceding soil science had achieved seems over-hyped in several respects). Still, maybe the technology really will be able to measure soil volumes and estimate carbon stocks in the soil cheaply and accurately someday. But I can’t see how it will tackle the more pressing political problem of reducing carbon stocks in the atmosphere, unless you subscribe to the view that better-evidenced capitalist carbon markets result in less capitalism.

George also says that the tech may eventually be able to give farmers instant readouts about their soils. But how will it help them find the yield/impact holy grail that he claims Tolly has found? By George’s account, this grail has something to do with soil bacteria and their behaviour, which presumably his ‘soilsmology’ technique can’t measure or characterise. Possibly, the technique may give farmers information that will help them protect their soils, though it’s not clear how it will overcome the wider pressures encouraging them toward soil destruction (politics has gone missing here again).

I can’t help feeling there’s a kind of spivvy middleman ambience about all this tech-happy food ecomodernism. Take a well-established technique like mixed farming, sex it up as a potential holy grail when accompanied by new tech inputs of a modest usefulness which can be glossed over in the sales patter, sell it to farmers while claiming that it’ll soon be cheap as chips, ignore the contemporary politics that make it so difficult to farm in ecologically wise ways, and on no account support the idea that more farmers and fewer middlemen might be a good way to go. It gets a lot of media airplay, but it doesn’t amount to a good analysis of the food system and it sells most people and most of the biosphere short.

George recently trailed once again his scornful critique of my polemic against his book Regenesis, writing “In any discussion of food and farming, unless your solution can be scaled to feed 8 billion people, you shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, cottagecore fantasies that would feed only the richest consumers, leaving billions to starve, are all too common.” He made no mention in that critique that he’d got his figure for the energetic cost of bacterial protein wrong. It’s abundantly clear that the bacterial solution he was touting won’t scale to feed 8 billion people. The priorities of the new CEO of Solar Foods, the bacterial protein manufacturer George promoted in Regenesis, include “driving growth in the Health & Performance Nutrition segment especially in the United States” and “increasing product price points”. To me, that sounds uncannily like feeding only the richest consumers.

So I guess it’s good that George seems to have quietly backtracked on bacterial protein and has swung more fully behind mixed farming of the kind that Tolly practices, even if he still wants to bang on about my alleged ‘cruel fantasies’. This ‘cruel fantasy’ of mine is that ordinary people should have access to land to grow food. I can’t see how it’s cruel, and I can’t see how George came to think that a monumentally energy hungry industrial process for growing bacteria to make protein could ever scale better than backyard bean growing.

My approach may nevertheless prove a fantasy inasmuch as it doesn’t suit economic and political elites to allow ordinary people the independent means to produce a modest livelihood. They prefer keeping people dependent on high-energy mass industrial food systems predicated on overproduction, monopoly rent and economic growth of the kind that generates ecological destruction and human poverty and hunger. I think those systems will fall apart from their own internal contradictions, and what happens next will arise out of the ensuing politics. There will be opportunities for agrarian localism and for people to take charge of generating local livelihoods ecologically. It’s very far from guaranteed that those opportunities will proliferate, but what I’d like to hear from those who dismiss agrarian localism as a fantasy is how they think mass industrial food systems will deliver good, population-wide nutrition and nature protection into the future. Food ecomodernism contains fantasies of its own, and a smattering of references to open source and anti-trust practices does not conceal them.

I don’t think I’m going to hear any answers to that question from George. Unfortunately, he now seems to be wrapped up in purveying high-end technologies of questionable benefit and recycling corporate-friendly diatribes against agrarianism. The days when he embraced inclusive local food systems have long passed. I find his political trajectory baffling – it’s definitely not last chance saloon ecomodernism, as I once thought. I understand how a ‘we got this’ technophilia allied to a vaguely radical politics can gain a writer public traction. I just wish our public intellectual culture was a bit more serious.

Ah well, I’ve given up trying to figure out what George is about. I’ve also given up writing data and reference-heavy rebuttals of ecomodernism as I used to, now that I’ve seen how little regard for intellectual integrity there is in the movement. But (sorry Walter!) I haven’t quite given up critiquing its broad intellectual failings and misplaced insouciance. For me, Philip Loring – author of the excellent Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology – nails what’s at stake in this present moment of food ecomodernism:

We can be sure that the greedy eyes of disaster capitalism are peering at us from around every corner, waiting to use the tremendous pain and suffering that is emerging around us to appoint themselves our saviours. I can hear it now: “Only we can solve this problem. Only we can feed the hungry. Only we can keep you safe.” These are the voices of manifest destiny. These are the voices of the white saviour. But in reality, the opportunists making these promises can deliver on none of these promises. Why? Because their approach – indeed, their very culture – is part of the system that creates these problems in the first place.

In this context, I’ve found it refreshing, if sobering, to read a thoughtful person like Tom Murphy taking a long-lens focus on the need for us to climb out of our high-tech modernist boat as it hurtles toward the rocks and try to make for land. That metaphor, and some of Tom’s ideas more generally, will be the subject of my next post.

Before that, a quick meta-comment. With various heavy demands on my time at the moment from farm, family and desk, I’m finding it hard to keep up this blog. I’m hoping things will ease sometime in the new year and I will try to get into blogging about my new book. I might struggle to answer blog comments and, still more, personal email messages in the meantime, but do please keep them coming (especially the former). If you’re looking to find some lights in a dark age or seek a small farm future, I’ve ambled my way through various podcasts recently, as advertised on my research and publications page here, so please do have a listen.