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 December 7, 2025 | 25 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.
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Regarding Solar Foods, I bet the recent Consumer Reports tests for lead and arsenic in protein powders are a gift to anyone who wants to get into the protein powder market with something else. (see https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a4206364640/ )
Regarding soil seismology… I wonder what about the impact on soil bacteria (and other soil life, from worms to beetles to moles) of playing noises through the soil to measure it. I don’t think it’s a good idea to assume there won’t be any impact, though whether it accelerates or inhibits bacterial growth isn’t something I’d like to guess about.
Tom Murphy draws the line at agriculture, thinking that foraging is self-limiting at a level that protects the health of the global ecosystem, whereas agriculture is not. I’m kind of surprised he didn’t draw the line at the use of fire, which foragers have used to greatly affect large swaths of nature. No other animals have fire, why should we?
I draw the line at heat engines. Without them, agriculture would have never industrialized (not much at all would have industrialized) and agriculture would have been self-limiting at levels that would have protected the global ecosystem. Local areas might be devastated by excess agriculture, but the global rate of devastation would be low enough that a balance would be established between damage and recovery.
Anyway, it’s too late now to pine for the days of pre-agriculture. We are stuck with industrial agriculture for a while, until industrialism as a whole collapses. After that collapse we will either see small scale agriculture as a transition to a return to foraging, or a balance will be struck between localized environmental damage from agriculture and recovery from that damage.
In any case, while modernity will end soon (though not soon enough), small farms are part of our post-modern future, at least for a while.
“Even if we could extract every ounce of copper in the ground in the coming decades, we could only replace 22% of our ageing fossil fuel energy system with an all electric one, then would be left wondering what to do with the remaining 78%… We clearly have a serious math problem here”
From The Honest Sorcerer .
The end of industrialtisation could well be closer than most think , technology needs , energy and materials , and time which it does not have , the finite planet is beginning to bite back .
Chris wrote, “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?”
There’s a great comment below George’s article in the Guardian, exposing the huge plot hole in Monbiot’s story:
Duebeni, 5 Dec 2025 8.46
“I’m missing something here. How will soil seismology assess the soil biome, and help to “train” (your term) those helpful bacteria?”
George’s story about soil seismology strikes me as being similar to other ecomodernist pitches, typically overhyped and overpromised, like reading an glowing advertisement but worse since it’s for a non-existent product. Monbiot’s bacterial protein “solution” he gushed about in Regenesis is a good example. In this latest scheme, Monbiot is one of the founders of the new venture, and may have even stronger motivations to overhype it.
About the $4 million funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, the Bezos site says it a grant, but the stated purpose of the grant is specifically for soil carbon measurement: “to develop sensors using seismology for soil carbon measurement.”
https://www.bezosearthfund.org/news-and-insights/bezos-earth-fund-announces-57-million-future-of-food-bold-action-food-systems-transformation
This other article (which Chris linked above) from the Bezos Earth Fund gives a seemingly typical ecomodernist timeframe, scope, and priorities: “Over the next few years” they’ll create a research network, which will work to someday “create the world’s first digital twin of the Earth’s soils” (marketable information for global investors?); and then, eventually “in time, the tools will be simple enough” for farmers.
www. bezosearthfund. org/news-and-insights/if-soils-could-talk-earth-rover-program
Wonder if you can eat digital potatoes ?
They make tolerable chips…………….
The reverse, actually: chips make good digital potatoes…
“Sequencing the Potato Genome… to more fully exploit the genetic potential of potato.”
Paper from 2009
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12230-009-9097-8
George Monbiot has been a shill for the nuclear industry for years. Then he moved on to shilling for ecomodernism. Now he has regressed to shilling for capitalism itself. This is not surprising. As a trained journalist, we should expect him to follow a research thread to it’s logical conclusion. However, he still hasn’t followed the logic thread far enough. If he did, he would have the same position as Chris. This is where being a social scientist provides a firm foundation. It really IS important to be able to integrate “la longue durée” and culture into your analysis. It also helps to have done field work, whether ethnography or archaeological digs. In my opinion, one of the reasons Amy Goodman is heads and tails above the George Monbiots of the world is because she has a degree in anthropology from Harvard (1984). In the future, George will likely adopt the Nate Hagens concept of a superorganism that cannot be controlled because no one is in charge. This is reification rubbish, of course, and I have been critical of Nate on this point in many comments on his YouTube podcasts. There are quite a few elites in control of multiple interlocked systems that make the world a bad place for the majority of poor people and for the physical environment. Just saying it is a superorganism which is beyond our control is a copout. George Monbiot has copped out too. He could use some paradigm shifting.
George makes the point, “In any discussion of food and farming, unless your solution can be scaled to feed 8 billion people, you shouldn’t be taken seriously.” This is rubbish too. As I have said many times and in various iterations over the last 55+ years, “If your model doesn’t contain at least one dieoff scenario, it is intellectually bankrupt.” Several people have pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet Union featured a dieoff but you had to be a medical professional to see it at the time. Now we see that Russia is still underpopulated, which is another reason for the land grab in the Donbas. It is a people grab too. (As well as a soils grab, minerals grab, etc. And don’t get me wrong. I am still critical of NATO, Obama’s Maidan coup, Ukraine’s Banderas, and all the reasons Putin was provoked. There are no “good guys” here.) Whether or not well-meaning people can actually pull off their reform agenda, we are STILL headed for recession, depression and collapse. Biological overshoot is a harsh master. Dieoff is just one component in the collapse of western civilization. Therefore your sustainable agriculture solutions/adaptations do NOT have to be scaled UP to the current level of overpopulation. George Monbiot is a fool to think otherwise.
The Chernozem soils extend from Ukraine into Hungary. A year ago, we spent a week in Budapest and Vienna. You can see the rich black Chernozem soils from the train between the two cities. It reminded me of the rich black soils of southern Minnesota where I grew up. One time I was doing some fall plowing for my brother and the low western sun glinting on the newly turned earth highlighted a lovely shade of dark blue. There is a town in Minnesota called Blue Earth for this very reason. Ukraine is an important prize, especially in a world that will need more food.
We already overproduce food (though distribution leaves something to be desired in terms of accessibility and equity) and you are talking about a die-off scenario as extremely likely, so what is this world that will need more food?
You are correct that we now have enough food to feed 8 billion people; it is just distributed unequally. Frances Moore Lappé said the same thing in Diet for a Small Planet (1971). But, as Vanguard often says in its primary advice to investors, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Of course smart investors use past performance anyway, but add a healthy dose of skepticism. One of the mistakes people make is that they only look at it in one way. In other words, they accept the economies of scale when the economies come from getting bigger, but they don’t accept economies of scale when the economies come from getting smaller. The same failure to look at both ends of a continuum applies to food production. It is not a truism that we will be able to keep the same yields and same volumes of food per capita deliverable to markets with a dieoff happening.
Yes, we will have economies of small scale post-collapse. But will people use targeted techniques and strategies, especially if they are used to a fossil fueled system? I don’t know but it seems unlikely. Are people actually going to use my system of starting small farmers markets within a 10-mile radius? They will have to of course, but the learning curve is very steep nowadays. Will people adopt an objective EROI energy measure based on kilojoules or kilocalories or even watts/hour? Seems unlikely. People don’t even listen to what I say nowadays and they have the time and money to do their own experiments. They are not likely to listen when they cannot communicate at a distance with people who are doing the research. To crib a line from Gil Scott-Heron in 1971, “The dieoff will not be televised.” Nor will it be on an internet that no longer exists.
As I said in a previous post, if you are a small-scale sustainable farmer outside of the capital-intensive fossil fuel loop, you will be able to absorb downturns in your yield because of climate change. The average wheat yield in the US is now 54.9 bushels/acre. It was 46.4 bushels/acre in 2017. Clearly wheat yields in the US are going up BUT would you be content with 40 bushels/acre and its equivalent on a small plot? Of course you would! You would still be doing better than medieval farmers. But what if you still depend on a transport system that has collapsed into a localized shell of its former glory.
The collapse of transportation networks will likely have a bigger effect on city people’s ability to get a decent loaf of bread. Or even to get a loaf of bread at all. If you cannot walk or bicycle to the pop-up market or even to the farmer who grows wheat, you might starve, even if there is plenty available. Oops.
And I didn’t even touch on the fertilizer issue.
I’m not sure that collapse of current transport networks necessarily means everyone will be limited to what they can get in a ten-mile radius (or some other arbitrary distance), or at least not for very long; we’ve had global trade for a lot longer than we’ve had fossil fuels, it’s just been a lot faster in the last few centuries. Would it take some time to re-opened old trade routes and learn to sail again? Yes, absolutely. We haven’t even re-grown the trees we used to build the ships in the previous expansions of sail, if I understand correctly. But I also know a thing or two about how quickly someone can learn to produce substantial quantities of food on a relatively small plot.
I do think that in a sufficiently large or fast die-off we could end up with localised famines as a result of insufficient labour to grow and harvest the food. I am not sure where to start with evaluating whether these would impact more people than the present inequity in food distribution. I feel it’s important to note that we aren’t going from a system that mostly works to a system that doesn’t: we’re going from a system that is inherently unfair and harms people, to a system that will have to function under very different conditions.
My instinct is that Putin’s designs on Ukraine have more to do with oil and energy exports than with land for food production. I could be wrong, it could be that Russia is not producing enough calories for its (relatively low, I think?) population and Putin wants to obtain those richer soils for industrial extractive farming. I suppose the strategy is to hold the land and decide how to profit later.
You make some good points Kathryn. But keep in mind the common prepper mantra. “After people miss nine meals, anarchy arises.” Also remember that I am not dealing in certainty. “Everyone will be limited . . . ” is not the kind of thing I say.
As I have said many times in the last few years, Homo erectus probably engaged in trade, which allows them to push right up to the periglacial environment near the ice sheets. So trade will likely continue, but not in the same fashion. But will it be localized? I think so. The adaptation to sail will probably arise again and a new version of the Cutty Sark will likely transport single malt Scotch to New York, but that is years down the road. This kind of thing is well-explicated in the Dies the Fire series (or Emberverse series) by S. M. Stirling (2004-2018). Stirling is a good writer too so these books are pleasant to read. Collapse is not a monolithic process. This is probably why most people cannot get their heads around it and struggle and disrespect those of us who point out that an unsustainable system will stop. The nuances of variable speed of collapse, transition strategies and tactical alternatives are just lost on them – BECAUSE they are simplistic and look for certainty.
As for fast-learning, you yourself are an exception to the rule and I salute you. But try teaching volunteers for awhile – or even people who pay for classes! – and THEN consider that those few fast-learners who make some progress are so few they are essentially random data points.
Just to be clear. Statements like ” . . . another reason for the land grab in the Donbas . . . ” are NOT statements that there is only one driver. How big is the lust for Chernozem soils? How about 50%. I deal in fluidity, but the cream rises to the top. When I was a boy I would go down to the barn and scoop up the raw cream in the 10-gallon cans from the previous night’s milking and put it on my breakfast cereal. That is probably why I have high cholesterol and hardened arteries to this day.
Allow me to make another point to Kathryn’s question vis-a-vis Ukraine. Good black dirt gives you many more options than limey brown clay. It also gives you more power because you can cram more peasants onto it. In other words, the black soil capital enhances your human capital. You also don’t have to have a years-long program to build up the soil by compost, green manures and cover crops. The US did not only lust for Ukraine’s and Russia’s rare earths, oil, natural gas, forests, etc. They also lusted for the good black dirt.
First job whoever wins is cleaning up all the unexploded ordnance and land mines , that’s a couple of decades at least, hell they are still finding it in France from a century ago .
They raise their eyebrows and look at me
HOW LONG DID IT TAKE
Time isn’t the problem
Energy is
And go back to hoeing a long row
COULDN’T YOU JUST USE A TRACTOR AND SELL SOMETHING IN TOWN
I could but
the fuel is a problem my good hoe resolves
competing with fuel and tractors
Is a younger mans fantasy
Cooking mostly what I grow is mine
You can live either one
I’d rather garden
Thank you, reading the said piece in the Guardian, my first thought after the eye roll was ‘I’d love to hear what Chris Smaje has to say to this’, and here it appeared in my RSS feed, so thank you again, your writing is much appreciated.
Brilliant and funny as ever. The first thing I saw, in this article, was a diagnostic tool for measuring the value of soil – an enclosure, a component of the rentier economy. Apparently the roll out has been paused in Kenya because the tenant farmers there spotted it too – they don’t want their landlords to see the results! Of course – the landlords will have the siesmic gizmo first!
I went in hard on this in ‘hardart’ who were singing its praises. The whole EarthRover concept is deeply questionable.
Also, loving the book! Enjoyed the podcast with Rachel, it has been heart warming witnessing her position shift over the 3 conversations and bodes well.
As you and Steve point out the roll out of this technology, if it would work, would not dramatically change how people farm or which yields they would get.
Changes in organic matter are slow and the positive results derived from it will be visible for any farmer interested in how their soils behave. And, there is even no guarantee that high organic matter contents (SOM) always is the best. On my farm, I have a lot of land that is former lake bottom or swamp with organic matter contents over 20 percent. Those lands are certainly not better than those with a still nice SOM content of 5-6. Coincidentally, I just made a round of soil analysis. On some fields the analysis showed dramatic increase in SOM, in one field from 11% to 24%. Considering that the field is in permanent ley cut for hay (and has been for the last 40-50 years I guess) and that I just have given it one low load of cow manure since 2014 (when we bought the farm), the result is nonsensical. I had the lab make a renewed analysis, this time with a chemical method as opposed to the physical methods they normally use for SOM measurements. The new results showed 15% lower SOM for the samples with high SOM content, but where fairly accurate for those with lower SOM. But even those lower values are certainly far too high. So either the old analysis was wrong or the sampling wasn’t dense enough (as soils are no).
I doubt that Georges trinket will be more reliable.
My second thought in reading the article was that I found it bad press ethics to let a columnist use the page to promote a commercial venture in which he seems to be quite involved.
I wouldn’t mind a pint in Oxford now and then. I believe I had one around 2003. It is a bit far though.
I am looking forward to your dialogue with Tom M. I have some problems with how he define modernism and his view of agriculture as the fall of man. Which makes me think about George M and his statement that agriculture itself is the problem, where did that go?
Per Tom Murphy and his position – as reported by Chris – that human agricultural civilization is a “busted flush.” As a long-time poker player I like the terminology, but the context is wrong. It would be more like drawing to a flush. In other words, the hand is not over and the pot odds favor staying in the pot to see the next card. For those unfamiliar with pot odds, these are simply the ratio of the current size of the pot to the cost of a contemplated call. For example, if you are playing hold ’em and your two down cards are of the same suit with two of the common cards of the same suit (i.e. four cards to a flush), your odds of filling your flush on the river are 52 – 4 -2 = 46 divided by the 9 cards of that same suit remaining in the deck, or a 5.11 ratio against filling your flush. However, if you can get a better positive ratio by winning the pot, it is a good decision to call the bet to see if you actually get one of the cards you want. [Sidenote: If your cannot get your head around the looseness of flipping positive and negative ratios, just think about absolute values.] For example, if you can put in a $10 bet to win only $50, you should not make the call. But if you can put in $10 to make $60 to win the pot, you should make the call. This view is based on positive expectations and the modern paradigm of poker as “one long game for the rest of your life.” This paradigm has also been extended into blackjack by Eliot Jacobson in his book The Blackjack Zone: Lessons in Winning at Blackjack and Life (2023). Jacobson was a mathematics and computer science professor before he became a blackjack consultant and collapsenik. I fully corroborate this “one long game” paradigm in my own gambling experience in poker and blackjack. It has been around for decades in the poker world.
On this same thread, it sometimes IS justified to draw to an inside straight, one of the tropes of poker being, “Never draw to an inside straight.” However, if you are playing hold ’em and you have better pot odds than the drawing odds, you should indeed draw to an inside straight. As a side note, consider the famous Jerry Garcia song Loser on his first single album (1972). Along with THE BEST opening lines in any rock song:
“If I had a gun for every ace I have drawn
I could arm a town the size of Abilene”
There are the following lines
“Everybody’s breakin’ and drinkin’ that wine
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines
Come to daddy on an inside straight
Well, I’ve got no chance of losin’ this time”
The song is called Loser because the protagonist has a habit of drawing to inside straights. However because he can see that the card he needs has a certain shine from being used that he has previously noticed (this happens, especially in private games), he knows that he’s “Got no chance of losin’ this time.”
The odds of getting the card you need on an inside straight are 46 divided by the 4 cards in the deck that can make your hand, or 11.5 against. In this instance, if it costs you $10 to make the call, you need to win a pot of $115 to justify the call. This is not an unusual occurrence, especially in highly volatile betting games like hold ’em. But you need to actually count up the chips in the center of the table. If you ask the dealer to make a count for you, you are tipping off the rest of the players that you are a more savvy player than you have let on plus it signals a straight or flush draw. Most professionals develop the ability to keep a running count of the chips in the pot. This also helps keep you sharp by the way.
So why all this talk of poker logic based on actual mathematics? Simply put, agriculture is a good bet. If I can grow five pounds of potatoes with an hour’s worth of my time, I get 1750 kilocalories of food energy output (350 x 5 = 1750) for 125 kilocalories of my input for an advantageous ratio of 1750 / 125 = 14 to 1. Wow! I will take that bet every day! In fact, I have been playing this “one long game” all my life. The occasional poker and blackjack wins using the same paradigm are just icing on the cake.
In Tom Murphy’s case, he would not have had a distinguished and lucrative career as a researcher and prof at San Diego for many years without the surplus built up on the beneficial ratio of food output to human agricultural labor inputs. He is now retired in Seattle, which is a good choice. If I was still living in the US, I would still be in the Pacific Northwest (water, sea, mountains, diversified agriculture, blue state, etc.). But I would NOT be in Seattle. Compared to what it was, it has gone waaaay downhill. My partner goes there every Christmas to see her grandchildren, but it is extremely stressful each time.
Bottom line: Someone who has a popular blog called Do the Math should not be dissing agriculture. It has given him his cushy life.
Walter, I am sure Tom Murphy is well aware of that “conflict”, and I don’t think it invalidates his opinion or argument.
I would say most people are in that same boat, one way or the other, even all the collpasniks on the internet. In the end, IF The Collapse will be as deep as they predict there will be no internet.
Hopefull, still some poker.
Gunnar – Whether or not Tom Murphy sees the contradiction between his cushy job and his advocacy is irrelevant. A person should not disrespect what puts food into his mouth. Literally puts food into his mouth. That said, Tom Murphy’s cushy job does not make his arguments invalid. His arguments are invalid because they don’t stand up to scrutiny. I may have more to say on this after Chris’ post on Murphy’s ideas are posted.
You might want to consider the damage done by simplifying the argument from a continuum of Çatalhöyük (early non-elite agriculture) to Tyson Foods (industrial agriculture) over a 5000 year timeline versus a static bright line argument of “agriculture is bad.” Murphy got this cracked idea from Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (1992) and the subsequent books in the series. Quinn was attempting a new kind of heuristic, thus the talking gorilla. I tried reading it years ago, but it simply failed to impress me, either in intent or in execution. Nevertheless, the book has become wildly popular. However, popularity does NOT equal validity. [Sidenote: I am considering a trip to Çatalhöyük in September so I can get a feel for the terrain. It has always intrigued me.]
The investigation into the downsides of agriculture is not new. Back in the 1970s – at least in the US – many of us back-to-the-landers were questioning agriculture but weighed all the options and settled on a mix of small-scale agriculture, small-scale horticulture, hunting and foraging. There is a very good reason Stalking the Wild Asparagus (Euell Gibbons, 1962) became a best-seller. Richard Manning wrote the first book entitled Against the Grain in 2004, well before James C. Scott’s book of the same name in 2017. I read Manning’s book but have not read Scott’s book yet. (It is on my list.) It sounds as if you were on a similar journey.
A real discussion of the damage done to the environment and the social structure would have to be done on a continuum – not only by place but by time. It would have to distinguish between small-scale and industrial agriculture. It would have to measure the effects by thermodynamic equivalents, example kilojoules, kilocalories, kilowatts/hr, BTUs, etc. It would have to discuss the co-evolution of wheat and corn with humans. I have spent over 50 years researching this and doing experiments. As far as I can see, Tom Murphy has done none of this. He simply bought into a “cool idea.”
I get soooo tired of people who promulgate and proselytize without dirt under their fingernails.
well, I think you know I agree with the general picture. I have written a piece or two “in defence of farming”, https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-farming
I wonder, is there really that much difference between foraging and farming? Walter rightly points out that there is a continuum in our interactions with the world we use to secure food, but the basics of those interactions are the same from one end of the continuum to the other: all animal species use their mental (decision-making) and physical capabilities to disturb or kill other species in pursuit of food. Whether it’s knocking fruit out of a tree with a stick, or driving a tractor across a field, we disturb and appropriate other lives to support our own. We have to do it or die.
I think what matters is the scale of the disturbance on that continuum. Scale it up to a high enough level and the ability of the affected area to recover is severely degraded. Industrial agriculture is almost certainly over the limit. Whether muscle powered agriculture is too much is an open question, but I think it is likely OK, based on the state of the natural world prior to industrial agriculture. If Murphy were promoting his argument against agriculture in 1600, he would have had a much tougher time convincing people that they were destroying the world’s ecosystem. That 1600’s ecosystem was nearly pristine compared with today.
As to the hypocrisy of being part of the modern world and also railing against it: none of us can avoid modernity and continuing to live within it makes us all prone to hypocrisy. All we can do is prepare to live without it once it’s gone. Like Murphy, I hope it is gone very soon for the sake of the thousands of generations of humans (and other species) to come after us.