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 22, 2025 | 52 Comments
I said my next post would cover my discussions with Tom Murphy, but I’m afraid time has caught up with me and I’m going to sign off for the year with this more general offering involving snippets from here and there. I promise that I’ll get to the Tom Murphy discussion early next year. There have been a few other promised posts I’m yet to deliver on too. I’m feeling the stress of next year’s blogging already.
Ah well, I did manage to put out twenty-six posts in 2025 (or a round twenty-five if you exclude Eric F’s guest post). The most commented on, at 134 comments, was Words and Worship, a twisty tale of nationalism, media, kings and religion. The least commented on, at six comments, was the preorder information for my book – no doubt occasioned by the fact that everyone had rushed out to bag themselves a copy.
Oh, that’s another thing I did this year. Wrote most of a book and published it, thanks to my friends at Chelsea Green. Responses to it so far have been mostly positive. I’ll put a few posts out about it next year. It feels like I’ve been marking time a little on this blog this year, but it’s hard to write a book, run a blog and try to do some farming too. I need to raise my game on the latter front next year, which may slow the pace of blogging, but I’ll try to offer some nuggets here as best I can.
What else to talk about? Well, I recently watched Dave Borlace’s YouTube video about the National Emergency Briefing in London, involving a bunch of experts basically scaring the hell out of us about climate change and demanding that it gets proper media attention and political action. Amen to that, although I found some of the presentations disappointingly confident that staving the emergency off while retaining business-as-usual is all in the bag if we just pull our finger out – a matter of renewable energy, EVs and plant-based diets. Perhaps we need another national emergency briefing to brief the national emergency briefers that far more radical change than that is needed.
Another thing that could do with proper media attention and political action is the corporate corruption of science. One recent example that was (not much) in the news: a heavily-cited study in a peer-reviewed academic journal that claimed the herbicide glyphosate was safe for humans was retracted after it turned out that its authors had been paid by the herbicide’s manufacturer Monsanto, and that Monsanto staff had partly ghostwritten the paper.
I used to write a bit about GMOs but for the most part I’ve stopped, partly because I got bored with the hectoring from biotech trolls (there’s a link between glyphosate and GMOs which I won’t elaborate here). I remember one such character crowing about the retraction of the Séralini study that had suggested health risks with glyphosate. He wrote something along the lines that “finally, there’s now no longer any study in the academic literature that shows any health risks for GMOs” and I remember thinking at the time that having the biotech industry crawling all over every such study made that rather self-fulfilling – a clear case of bias in both the technical and everyday sense. As food campaigner Pat Thomas wrote in response to the glyphosate retraction “Good…but also I’ve watched colleagues be attacked, and even lose their jobs for trying to shine a light on the scientists for hire behind glyphosate “safety” claims. Count all the ways fake corporate science ruins lives.”
I can’t say I’ve ever lost my job for trying to shine a light on dodgy scientific claims, though I suppose that’s unlikely to happen when you’re a self-employed writer and smallholder. Still, I felt a few chill winds when I published my critique of the erroneous figures and corporate-friendly spin in high-profile journalist George Monbiot’s food book Regenesis.
I’ve ended this year revisiting my disagreements with George – a revised and expanded analysis of my previous post discussing his Jeff Bezos-funded adventures geared around verifying financial markets in soil carbon has just been published on Resilience. As outlined in that piece, I’m at a loss to know how to push back against food ecomodernism. Get into the technical details, like George’s dodgy energy figures for bacterial protein powder, and people glaze over. Try to tell a different story of how we might live, or might have to live, and you get likened to a Nazi or a cottagecore fantasist.
I think there’s a lack of integrity on George’s part for not – to my knowledge – recanting his demonstrably erroneous figures, but maybe that’s my naivety. Not many people really care about plain facts, even when they set out their stall otherwise. A recent article about a journalistic titan of an earlier era, Walter Lippman, describes the argument of his 1922 book Public Opinion thus:
modern man responds not to accuracy but to the power of public fiction, not to real environments but to the invented ones that large numbers of people agree on, common prejudices that become ‘their interior representations of the world’
I guess that’s it. People are great at inventing ‘public fictions’ together through devices like language and money. Eventually these fictions usually collide with ‘real environments’. We find that we can’t feed the world with bacterial protein powder, or that present levels of fossil-fuelled urbanism were never sustainable in the long run. But for now the public fictions hold firm. Alas, this makes the eventual reckoning with real environments all the more disastrous when they come.
Another reckoning with hard reality – the war in Ukraine. A lot of us discuss it from a distance on this blog and rehearse our various geopolitical ideas. I got an angry comment from a Ukrainian reader about some remarks in the comments under my last post. I didn’t publish it because it didn’t meet my moderation standards, and the commenter was unwilling to revise it, although I did have a positive email exchange with them. A reminder for us all, perhaps, that some people have more skin in the game on topics discussed here.
Talking of skin in the game Mick, a friend, has recently been sentenced to twenty-six months in jail plus hefty costs for his part in climate change protesting, with evidence for his defence in respect of climate change ruled inadmissible in court. In my much more minor brush with the powers that be for climate protesting I was cut off by the magistrates when I spoke about climate change. I’m not a big fan of prison for anybody except the seriously dangerous, and I believe that people charged with an offence should be able to say what they like in their defence and have it considered, but there we have it. Mick’s a good man with real integrity who’s worked hard for the local community here. I’ll be sparing a thought and raising a glass for him while I’m enjoying my family Christmas. Likewise for the Palestine Action hunger strikers putting themselves on the line – one more grisly episode in a horrific litany of them for which Western governments including Britain’s bear a lot of responsibility.
Anyway, talking of Christmas, that’s it from me for the year. I’m going to be offline from now through until early in 2026. Maybe I’ll see you at the Oxford Real Farming Conference on 8 January, where I’ll be signing books and talking about Finding Lights… with my editor Muna and my wife Cordelia.
Meanwhile, many thanks to everyone who comments here and makes this blog a living entity. There have been some really excellent comments here this year that have obviously involved a lot of time and effort. I’m sorry that I can’t always find the time to respond as fully as I’d like, but I very much appreciate them. I’m looking forward to new conversations next year. If you’ve got any thoughts on topics to cover or different ways of doing things on this blog feel free to use the suggestion box below. For now, here’s wishing you health, happiness and spiritual rejuvenation on this wounded earth.
Paul Kingsnorth Against the Machine
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie The French Peasantry 1450-1660
Henrik Meinander A History of Finland
John Tutino The Mexican Heartland
Jan de Vries The Industrious Revolution
Also, I found this article interesting – any thoughts?
It’s a pretty white male list in all honesty. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with white men as such, but diversification suggestions welcome…
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I’m sorry to read that Mick has been sentenced to prison time.
Some readers here may be interested in the work of the Solidarity Apothecary and in particular a book called The Prisoner’s Herbal, by Nicole Rose, who has herself spent time in prison for protest work.
Interesting article on peak conventional oil and financialisation, but I’m not sure that the opportunistic financialisation/cannibalisation described is so directly caused by the increased cost of energy acquisition, rather than just being a general by-product of financial instability in general. The ultra rich can always afford to buy the dip, we have seen this before. I suppose my issue is that the article doesn’t really explain why we chose cannibalisation rather than accepting a lower standard of living. Or “we”, anyway: my own standard of living is certainly lower than that of my parents, and I don’t recall choosing neoliberal cannibalisation, so despite my relative privilege (I don’t live in a war zone yet, I have a roof over my head and a pantry full of food and a very nice bicycle, and so on), I’m starting to get weary of being scolded about the choices “we” have made, as if growing even more of my own food and using the heating less would somehow fix everything. It probably wasn’t meant to come across quite like that, but the issue of how to best hold to account the people who really do hold and wield power is something I have been thinking about recently.
Thanks as always for all of your writing.
Book suggestion: “Overcoming Exploitation & Externalisation” by Freiderike Haberman. She’s still white but at least she isn’t male 🙂
https://www.routledge.com/Overcoming-Exploitation-and-Externalisation-An-Intersectional-Theory-of-Hegemony-and-Transformation/Habermann/p/book/9781032446813
In respect of the linked article, Trump’s recent theft of several hundred million dollars of oil from Venezuela and increasing overtures of capture of Greenland backs up Newbury’s theory: the US really needs more oil.
https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2025/12/23/panama-confirms-u-s-seized-oil-tanker-violated-countrys-flagging-rules/
Just a bit of news about oil tanker
Happy Christmas Chris and family.
A suggestion to add to your reading list.
Luke Kemp’s “Goliaths Curse”.
Roughly an analysis of civilization as entrapment and the curses that leads to there eventual collapse. Gives a screed at the end that we must reform our current Global Goliath, but I prefer collapse, as not being dominated is a lot healthier, though getting through the collapse bottleneck is another matter.
I have James Scott’s “The art of not being governed” for my holiday reading.
I’m pretty sure that this quote came from Goliath’s Curse. My trouble is that whatever I read just dumps into some kind of murky memory pool and I’m never quite sure afterward. But I second your recommendation:
“…state formation and collapse are best understood as a criminal enterprise being established and then broken apart by infighting or pressure from competitor rackets.”
Luke Kemp is well-read and has an interdisciplinary focus. He probably got it from Charles Tilly in War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.
James C Scott published with the title of “The art of not being Governed” in 2009, long before Luke Kemp published “Goliaths Curse” in 2025.
James C Scott states in the preface to his book that he got the title from Jimmy Casas Klausen, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who taught a course in political philosophy titled The Art of Not Being Governed, who graciously agreed to the title being used for James C Scott’s book. This not me demonstrating great memory, but having read the preface this morning, as I have set Mr Scott’s work as my Christmas read. Very good so far. Luke Kemp has taken the concepts of caged lands, lootable resources, and prehistoric egalitarian societies from Scott’s work (Scott states none of the ideas he uses are original to himself, and I am sure Luke Kemp would have read some of Scott’s original sources), he added the idea of monopolisable weapons and Goliaths curses: elite competition, over extraction from the masses, famine, plagues and the dark triad. Kemp maps these ideas on to pre-Columbian America’s and the ancient middle east. Scott and Kemp’s books have different subjects, Kemps about civilizations, how they sustain themselves (not by being nice!) and how they fail. Scott’s is about the last large unenclosed area of earth and how the people’s there have avoided until recently being governed by the states they are nominally part off, and they have very good reasons to avoid so.
What I was referring to was, “state formation and collapse are best understood as a criminal enterprise.” Eric F. couldn’t remember where he heard this and thought it might be Kemp. Tilly seems to be the original source. Charles Tilly’s essay was titled War Making and State Making as Organized Crime and appeared in Bringing the State Back In (1985, Evans & Reuschemeyer, editors). Charles Tilly was an eminent sociologist and is sometimes credited as the “founding father of 21st-century sociology.” He was at the University of Michigan from 1969-1984 and so would have come into contact with Marshall Sahlins and just missed Elman Service at Ann Arbor. He died in 2008. If anyone is interested in Tilly’s essay, here is al link to a website that provides a PDF copy.
https://davidlabaree.com/2025/06/05/the-state-as-organized-crime-3/
It is fashionable nowadays to default to the integrative theory of state formation instead of conflict theory. Joseph Tainter goes into both theories in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). Tainter gives partial credit to both theories but comes down predominantly on the side of integrative theory. This is simply that bureaucracies arise because they provide greater integration of resources into society. Controlling land and irrigation to improve grain yields in Sumer, for example. Conflict theory is simply that the elites snookered all of us early on. I myself hold a contrary view to Tainter, in that both theories have merit but I come down predominately on the side of conflict theory. The idea of the state as organized crime is squarely in the conflict theory camp. In my long-time analysis of the state as a bad thing, it is convenient to typify it as an institutionalized version of criminal gangs. But – and this is important – the real culprit is not assholes who abuse their power, like Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron. The real culprits are the institutions of state power, like the law itself and the police power that enforces the law at the point of a gun, the baton and the locked prison door.
@Walter,
Yes, you are quite correct that the regime could not function in an organized way without its many enforcers and functionaries.
I must preface this next by saying that I’m a white middle class man, so I recognize that I get special treatment.
But – the majority of the enforcers and functionaries are at such a low level that they do what they do simply because it’s a job. Surely many of them would happily jump at the chance to be the crime boss, but so would many janitors or insurance agents or grocers.
Of course “Just following orders…” is not a defense, but still, I see the problem not in the choices of the individuals who make bad career decisions, and especially not the individuals who don’t have any good options. But instead I see the core problem to be the overarching narrative that tells us that resources are scarce and the only way is to take them for ourselves. Without this narrative, it would be glaringly obvious that the king is nothing but a criminal.
And now that the narrative of greed is so pervasive, it is almost impossible to build a stable community around generosity.
I met a nice man last night who had a well-paid and satisfying career engineering the F-35 fighter jet for Lockheed-Martin. He showed no sense of irony that it was an over-priced boondoggle that doesn’t operate to specifications. Though I’m actually happy that the F-35 is an expensive disaster, because it can only hasten on the collapse of the US empire.
I’m also happy that I discovered early enough that I didn’t need to make so much money that I’d be required to do that kind of job for the empire. Surprisingly few people have even that minimal level of imagination to arrive at such a notion.
Well Eric, I am going to call “Bullshit!” on your rationale that the thugs with badges (the police) are just “victims” of an oppressive system. And the same for your story about the “nice man who had a well-paid and satisfying career engineering the F-35 fighter jet for Lockheed-Martin,” who “showed no sense of irony that it was an over-priced boondoggle that doesn’t operate to specifications.”
I am not going to mince words here. Get a grip and take responsibility for your role in keeping the System alive. The only way out – that I know of – is to not play a part in the System. One has to prostitute themselves to keep a roof over one’s head and food on the table. But you DO NOT have to buy the lie. Further, if you have a conscience, you should not put yourself into a position where you have to enforce the law against innocent pot smokers, Palestine Action protesters, unwed mothers seeking abortions, etc., etc., etc. As an anecdote, I had a good friend in 1969 who was pressured to join the police because he came from a long line of Irish cops. He quit when he realized he might be forced to beat in the heads of some of his friends on the front lines of demonstrations against the War.
For all those who believe that the New Testament has some credibility, whether as myth or divine truth, Pontius Pilate is a metaphor for what I am talking about. His great sin was not that he condemned Jesus, but that he washed his hands of responsibility.
By the way, I have spent over fifty-five years of trying to make change and standing up against the greatest superpower in the history of the world. I am going to sign off and work on my health problems. Bye.
@Walter,
I wish you well and hope you make progress with your health issues.
Regarding the integrative state vs the conflict or criminal state:
If one comes down on the side of the nature of the state as integrative, participation in civic life can be seen as being virtuous, being a good person contributing to the greater good. If one sees the state as a criminal enterprise, any kind of participation makes one a coconspirator in crime.
But this kind of dualism seems a little too pat; surely all states are a mixture of both. If we want to nudge the state toward the more integrative role, lawful participation is the probably the best way to do it.
If one sees government and its activities as predominantly criminal, and if the balance of any participation is seen as contributing to that criminality, the only way to continue being virtuous is to leave the state entirely.
Becoming and living as a stateless person or not paying or receiving tax money or not engaging in any kind of civic or economic participation is extremely difficult to do. I dare say that leaving the US and moving to France is no solution either. France is surely as much a “criminal” state as the US.
Perhaps there are pockets of moderate statelessness around the world, such as the interior Amazon or Congo basins, but as things stand now, every square inch of land surface is controlled by one state or another. States are hard to avoid.
In the end, I think we can arrange our lives to do less harm and at the same time nudge our states toward becoming less harmful. But do need to prepare for the day that modern states disappear; they can’t last much longer. Perhaps then we will find out whether that disappearance will cause us to rejoice (or despair). In either case, the transition from being a citizenof a state to statelessness is going to be hard.
@Walter Haugen
Yes, I agree with your gangster theory of State formation.
I think that, in Europe at least, local warlords employed the services of The Church to legitimise their rule. The Church bureaucracy administered the newly formed “State” and transformed the warlords into kings ordained by god.
To witness today every one horse town in England having a church, just shows how far reaching the bureaucracy was!
A few years ago I was in our local brewpub in Ferndale, Washington and a fellow I was talking to asked me about Paul Krugman (famous economist who still writes a column for the New York Times). I told him Krugman was too rightwing for me. He literally spit out his beer. I could probably get the same response from the present set of people I hang around with if I said The Guardian is too rightwing for me. It is not surprising that George Monbiot still writes for the “sorta socialist rag from Fleet Street.” The thing that kinda bothers me is that Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) still gives George Monbiot some credibility and has him on her show once in awhile.
Personally, I am not worried about the corruption of science. I do my research and apply the results. But I am doing this so people will have food to eat after environmental overshoot results in dieoff. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist and applied his research too. But he applied it to evil purposes. He should have seen where it would lead and so bears the blame. I am certainly willing to bear the blame of growing new landraces in the “supposedly” evil field of agriculture (per Tom Murphy). Science always has corruption as part of its research program and its funding. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Watched the Oppenheimer film a couple of nights back. He knew perfectly well what his research would lead too. He just thought he could talk sense into the political class of the US. He was naive. Give a man ape a weapon no other man ape posses and not expect him to make himself king of the jungle? To use a metaphor. In the early days of science there was little corruption. A lot of the big advances were achieved by obscure scientist on minimal budgets ( though some did achieve fame for their discoveries, but rarely wealthy) This was usually basic research, often not directly monetisable. Today the majority of research is explicitly directed at making money. It is either corporate, or corporate money paying a university department, and their is a lot of money. An old rule is where there is a lot of money, you will find a lot of corruption. This is not helped by having a hugely inflated university sector, which will take money from anyone to keep itself inflated, and it’s senior staffs salaries fat. The university sector needs gutting, and what’s left turned into trade schools for the professions. The basic research has been done, most of it a century past, let the corporation pay for their pet engineers and own their results. Too many people are hanging onto a myth of science that is a century out of date.
Here’s a thought experiment:
By chance, one of the 71 billionnaires in London picks up a lightly used copy of Small Farm Future that was left by a groundskeeper at the Queenwood golf club. He actually starts reading and is intrigued enough to finish the book.
A few days later he contacts the author, Chris Smaje, and proposes a demonstration project that would move 100 willing, but poor, families out of their London flats to small farms of their own somewhere in the UK.
But before the project can begin, he asks for a budget. He doesn’t expect any financial return or management help (he knows Chris is a busy man with other projects of his own), he just wants to know what his philanthropy will cost, including everything needed to situate each family for sustainable subsistence living. He is completely flexible regarding land tenure and housing options as long as costs per family are minimized/optimized.
What would make up the list of major budget line items? What would be the total project cost?
I am not sure “self sufficient” is the right framing: a single smallholding being entirely self-sufficient for all their material needs is incredibly difficult, and humans thrive in community.
The Church of England currently pays stipendiary priests in tied housing £30000 per year; the idea of the stipend is not that it is payment for services rendered, but that it is the amount needed to raise a family without undue hardship and without needing to take on other employment. In practice, I think this assertion only holds true if one parent does not work outside the home; otherwise the cost of childcare gets prohibitive fast. My previous parish priest spent the entirety of her stipend on childcare, and her kids were only at nursery three days per week.
The actual cost to the church of a stipendiary priest is closer to £100k. A large chunk of this goes into training (which is free for clergy) and pensions (since we aren’t allowed to just let people work until they die in post these days), and some towards general administrative costs. Congregations are asked to pay as much of this as possible, though it’s clear that a small congregation made up mostly of soup kitchen guests in the city is going to find that much more difficult than a large middle class congregation in the suburbs. Rural congregations face their own set of demographic challenges… and in all cases the congregation also has to pay for electricity, heating and maintaining the (usually cavernous and uninsulated) building, mains water if there is any, any other paid staff (cleaners, organists, parish administrators if you’re lucky), and various other expenses. The way many churches manage this is through hiring out their premises.
So what?
Give me (with my current experience in gardening) a stipend of £30k/year and a house of some sort to live in, on a reasonably fertile three to five acres with some kind of rain catchment system sufficient for both irrigation and drinking water, and I reckon I could easily be “self-sufficient” in food and pay for reasonable other costs like mains water, electricity and so on our of the stipend. With my current skills I would need to change my diet (I currently eat dairy and meat despite not having livestock of my own), but I already grow more than a third of the food for my little household of three, so feeding the same household and accounting for some crop failures I would in the first instance triple my growing space (…except for winter squashes, I already grow more of those than three of us can eat), add more legumes and way more grains, and get serious about some oilseeds. I would also plant as many different fruit and nut trees as possible, knowing I could cut them down later if I needed the space for something else. In fact, once I’m not spending the stipend on food I could probably move towards getting a second house built with a rocket mass heater in it, getting a woodlot started, getting a lot better at spinning and weaving, learning how to deal with livestock and so on. I’d rather spend the money on things like feeding troughs and looms than on shop potatoes anyway. I honestly don’t know whether I’d prefer to start with chickens, pigs or cows for livestock… I really do like butter and cheese but eggs might be less work. I would need to up my seed-saving game but only a little bit. We’ll make the reasonable assumption that it takes someone three years to get to my level of horticultural and food preserving skill, and another three years to get the hang of livestock, and the unreasonable assumption that there is nothing to spend on taxes.
In this scenario I had better hope that some neighbours keep wool sheep and there are a lot of nettles around, because eventually my existing clothing is going to fall apart. My mending skills are pretty good (if very visible) and I have enough darning needles to last the rest of my life, but spinning thread thin enough to mend lighter fabrics is still something I can only do in very small quantities, and unravelling thread from old clothes to use to patch the new isn’t usually suitable for lighter fabrics either. I think it would be easier with a spinning wheel than with my drop spindle, but my current woodcarving skills aren’t up to that… so now in addition to “some kind of house” and “some kind of rain catchment system” I need to add a spinning wheel and a loom and probably some other textile stuff as start-up equipment. Making and maintaining a family’s clothing and other textile needs (bedsheets, curtains, towels, bandages) used to be quite a large portion of women’s work; now it has been outsourced to factories in countries and corporations with dubious labour practices. It’s hard for me to tell how long it would take me to learn these skills but spinning is definitely something that takes practice. If a neighbour is good at it, maybe they could spin the fine thread and I could mend their clothes and mine. We would all be owning quite a bit less clothing, at any rate.
Similarly, my building skills are pretty rudimentary. I can assemble a shed, or fashion a garden arch out of hazel rods, but I don’t have the experience to make larger shelters. I have never worked with thatch before and don’t know what I would need in order to fire clay roof tiles. This year I’ll be making a greater effort at some kind of fencing to keep the venison off my veg at the Far Allotment, but that’s not the same skillset as building a barn. I think that, as with textiles, there would be much gained to mend and patch what already exists rather than building from scratch. But even if I had the knowledge to build a barn, that’s not the sort of thing it’s easy to put together alone: much better to have help.
I dabble in herbal medicine. I am not formally trained and it’s a good idea to have training and reference books. I don’t have any metalworking skills, my housemate is pretty handy with a soldering iron so could keep at least some electronics limping along for a while. I can whittle a bit and have messed around with clay a bit but I’m a very long way from being able to produce durable pots and pans or preserving jars or a fermentation airlock. The equipment I do have should see me out, though without refrigeration I would want even more jars.
And so it goes with other skills too… And at some point it makes a lot more sense to have a village than a smallholding.
I think if you gave every household (not every adult!) £30k/year for ten years, and they weren’t paying for land, that would be more than enough to enable a community to get as close to “self-sufficient” as it’s possible to be, including some kind of specialty production to trade for goods and services (maybe I do the really good blight-resistant tomato seeds and my neighbour makes excellent beer). I suspect it could be done for quite a bit less, but it would depend a lot on the work capacity of the people involved.
But for many households today, this income is still do-able with one or maybe two people doing off-farm labour, so why aren’t more people doing this already?! The problem is that most of it goes on rent or a mortgage. And the job itself usually ties people to cities, where there isn’t enough land available to begin to find out what’s possible, so they have to keep working the job to make ends meet. If someone were to give me that same five acres but no stipend, I would probably make a pretty good go of it, though the first few years would be very tough; if someone gave me the land in a location where my spouse could still work a spreadsheet job, we would be set up to get by comfortably by the time he reaches retirement age.
Denying access to land for subsistence is a great way to keep your workforce dependent on employers and currencies. So, for that matter, are taxes levied in currency.
A minor correction: I would triple the space I give to moderately productive annual crops (potatoes, beans, root veg, maize etc) and substantial, low-effort perennials (such as Jerusalem artichokes). I probably wouldn’t triple my space for asparagus or strawberries, or anything that needs too much weeding; it would be more sensible to devote that space (and more importantly on three to five acres, that time and effort!) to a greater diversity of medicinal and culinary herbs than I currently manage to produce, or to oilseeds or fibre crops. Similarly I just don’t have the time and energy to manage much more in the way of tomatoes and peppers than I already grow; I would probably cut down to two or three varieties plus my BR landrace project for the tomatoes, rather than my current approach of ten or so plants in the landrace, another ten commercial F1 BR varieties to save seeds from to stick them into the landrace, and a further fifteen or twenty plants, two or three per variety, just becasue I love tomatoes… so I’d keep the same number of tomato plants but I would be able to batch the maintenance work more, and the BR landrace would get heavy selection for low maintenance, fruit keeping well on the vine and so on. (Or I might go for bush varieties that don’t require training and pruning, though an awful lot of allegedly bush varieties I’ve tried seem to get very tall and do better with support, so I’m not sure I believe in them really, tomatoes do what they want.) I currently grow on about a tenth of an acre, and I imagine that if someone gave me some land and a stipend, I would devote two or maybe three tenths of an acre to annuals and low-effort perennials, and an unknown further quantity to grains and oilseeds. Peppers might be right out depending on what kind of indoor propagation space I have available. This summer my outdoor ones didn’t ripen — clearly this was just poor variety selection on my part, as we couldn’t have had better weather for them, whereas in 2024 (much wetter) my outdoor peppers did pretty well.
Incidentally, I’m amused by the differing approaches Walter and I have to this thought experiment. I am very much basing my calculations on “this is what I see people living on when their housing costs are taken care of and it’s quite reasonable; this is how much food I already grow” with any provision for producing a currency income from the land as something of an afterthought, to be sorted out once basic subsistence skills and infrastructure are in place. Walter is starting with trying to sell produce. I am assuming low-till methods and hand tools, he starts with a tiller and fossil fuels. I don’t think either approach is necessarily wrong, but perhaps it reveals something about our existing experiences. I think if I were selling the majority of my produce I would start to be concerned about nutrient balance in the soil and would need to think carefully about inputs from off-farm. We both identified irrigation as a potential issue, and I do think this is important, but then I’m in East London where we often (but not always) have dry summers. I might be more worried about drainage if I were in another part of the country.
Perhaps I should have said “these families for sustainable subsistence living”. One hundred families is enough for a village with a modest amount of labor specialization. The whole point of my suggestion was to zero in on the cost of setting up willing people in a community, however organized, that could sustain itself without access to markets (or any outside support).
I know that indigenous communities did trade with other communities, even distant ones, but 100 families provides enough genetic diversity and opportunity for internal trade that it should be able to be self-sustaining even if cut off from the rest of the world.
So, what would the billionnaire have to spend to set these people up in such a community?
If the land is free and it’s possible to do other (paid!) work (i.e. there is reasonable proximity to a city), maybe nothing.
If the billionaires want to ensure that households in the village are free from their labour being extracted for profit from the outset, I really think £30k/year for ten years would be more than sufficient. That’s £30 million, which is still small change to a billionaire.
Exactly how the households would spend that money would vary from village to village and household to household, of course. So perhaps Walter’s idea of some mentors or consultants is a good one. I’m wary of being too prescriptive about it, though, because different land will require different strategies. That said, I would also want to do something to encourage communal management of some resources (pasture or wetland or nut orchard or whatever) and mixed common/individual management of others (the flock of sheep/herd of cows/pigs, perhaps).
An aside: I didn’t gather any walnuts this year because my spouse didn’t eat the ones from last year yet; our housemate is allergic to them so we don’t tend to use them in communal meals. But yesterday I opened some and they were fantastic! Much better than the somewhat musty-tasting ones from the shop. I had forgotten how well nuts store in their shells, and now I regret not collecting walnuts this year too. (I did get a few kilos each of almonds and hazelnuts so can hardly complain.) I’m going to try growing peanuts next year, though I suspect the mice will be very happy about it and I won’t see much of a crop.
So you think that if someone spent £30,000,000 over ten years, plus free land, it would be enough to set up a 100 families in a self-sufficient community? That might be reasonable, but I’d like to see the breakdown of where the money would be spent.
Using your numbers, note that if each family were a family of four, the cost would be £75,000 per person (plus land). Thus, to move a million people out of London it would cost £75 billion, the entire population of London would cost £750 billion and the population of the UK would cost £5.25 trillion.
£5.25 trillion is “only” four years of UK tax revenue, but it wouldn’t be possible to spend it all on building rural communities every year. Perhaps 10% per year, or £130 billion/year, over forty years would be possible. For comparison, this would be roughly twenty times the amount of money the UK goverment received from taxes on North Sea oil and gas during the last forty years.
Thus, if the UK had spent all the revenue from the North Sea for the last forty years on moving people out of cities to the country, it would have been able to move 5% of the population. This indicates the scale of the economic and political cost of re-ruralization.
Note also that if these expenditures were actually made, the UK would be destroying the existing capitalist economy at the same rate it was moving people to the country. By the end of the process, there would be no modern economy left (which is the whole point, of course). And just starting the process would result in a rapid devaluation of every urban asset and every urban company when people came to the realization that every city was to be abandoned.
Looks to me like this is going to be a really tough project to complete. But perhaps the small pilot project we are speculating about would clarify things. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to spend £30 million on.
@Joe
In the first year or so I suspect it would largely be spent on living expenses: food, clothing, heating, medical care, transport — whatever is required so that the household doesn’t need to seek outside employment and can spend their time and energy learning how to garden, how to make and maintain clothes, how to maintain a woodlot and off-grid sewage, how to get along with their neighbours, and how they might like to specialise.
As the living expenses drop over time (due to the food and cloth and firewood being produced), more would be spent on infrastructure and tools: a greenhouse, or a better barn, or some kind of pedal-powered thresher, or a mill of some description, or whatever a blacksmith or cooper needs to function, or a community hall where people can gather for worship and meetings and parties.
I can’t give a line-by-line breakdown of exactly how the money would be spent because the sensible way to spend the money is going to vary from place to place!
It’s also entirely possible that this could be done perfectly adequately on, say, £12k/year rather than £30k. I only chose the latter number because someone else has already done the arithmetic on how much it theoretically costs in the UK to keep a family on a single income with no mortgage or rent. It’s also possible that just giving people the land itself and letting them figure out the money side of things would work, but currently if someone offered me only land and a house I would probably need to decline if my spouse couldn’t continue working. I’d like to change that, but we aren’t quite there yet; the free land, of course, doesn’t exist, but at least I’m spending a lot less on food than I did in 2019, while eating much better.
I predict that if the stipend is too low then you’re going to see things like using the woodlot at a faster rate than it can regrow, or selling produce off-farm and not recovering the nutrients and biomass, as people seek to either cut costs or increase income. Either that or they’ll be forced to take off-farm work — but that runs into the danger of them being paid less than they should (since they don’t need to buy as much food or cloth or firewood), which is basically recreating the captured garden scenario described in Steven Stoll’s work.
@Kathryn,
I think we need to think “greenfield” investment here. The land is free, but there is nothing on it. This would be the case for virtually everyone who leaves a city, excluding only the very few “first movers” who might find an abandoned house or other building the move into.
This means a family needs a place to live, with road access to it, some tools and training at the very minimum. A better start would mean including some woodland (for cooking and heat), some animals for transport, draft work and food, and some outbuildings for the animals and the firewood. Don’t forget the catchment system if a shallow, hand pumped, well is not possible.
Depending on the age, employment status and family size, the housing must be enough to tempt people into taking the chance of moving. You’re not going to get many takers using tents and tarps as housing, so living accommodations will have to be reasonably solid, even if much smaller than usual. Electricity or no-electricity is a big decision, too.
I’m not familiar enough with civil and structural contruction costs in the UK to know whether your estimate of £30,000 a year for ten years is reasonable, but most of the money might need to be spent up front for infrastructure, with the remainder for training and support after the family moves in. Frontloading the expense makes it harder to come up with the money if the program expands beyond the billionaire funding stage.
Communal systems could easily save some money, but having everyone’s allotment within a short walking distance would be important (assuming communal housing but familial horticultural land).
All-in-all it would be a big project with a lot of planning required. And if the land isn’t free, the price goes up. Arable land in the UK is about £10,000 per acre. I’m guessing at least four acres per family would be needed; one acre of woodland, one acre for horticulture, and two acres for pasture, buildings and roads.
@Joe
I did say “a stipend of £30k/year and a house of some sort to live in, on a reasonably fertile three to five acres with some kind of rain catchment system sufficient for both irrigation and drinking water”. Reality is likely to be less favourable, but I still think the ten year plan I sketched out would make for a very congenial existence in most places.
I expect a transition to a more agrarian existence will be more piecemeal than planned. I don’t own any land and still produce a fair amount by making use of allotments. I know someone else who couldn’t get an allotment (or got tired of waiting for one) and asked several neighbours if she could grow veg in their front gardens; most said yes. I doubt I’ll ever have some billionaire buy me a smallholding, but learning to grow food, manage water, mend clothing and care for trees now, even in a limited way, puts me in a position to make use of whatever resources are to hand in a likely future situation of personal, political or social upheaval. There is of course a limit to how far that can take me, but my current life isn’t going to last forever either, and has its own disadvantages, diseases and discomforts.
And yes — “sustainable subsistence” is, I think, a better framing.
Thanks for the comments, good wishes and reading suggestions. Luke Kemp has been on my radar, but not Friederike Haberman. More reading to do!
Perhaps we can come back to the Steven Newbury article sometime.
Great thought experiment from Joe. I’ve been involved in some experiments somewhat along these lines, a tale that I may tell here sometime. Meanwhile I’d love to develop a conversation on this blog about the costs and budget line items as suggested by Joe. Another theme for next year. But signing off now for a couple of weeks – happy holidays everyone.
Okay. Here’s my two centimes on the thought experiment proposed by Joe. I have thought a lot about this over the years. Fifteen years ago I was contacted by someone down in Los Angeles, California that supposedly had the money and wanted my input on how to do something like this. I sent him some projections and an overall cost estimate but nothing ever came of it. As with most venture capitalists and philanthropists, he probably wanted maximum publicity on the cheap. I was also put in touch with the Lummi Tribe at the same time and they wanted to do some community gardens on the rez. (We lived about three miles from the Lummis.) I gave them some projections and they hired someone else to do the job. He failed spectacularly, so they contacted me a year later. I gave them the same projections and a $10,000 demand to get started, which was less than they had already spent for no results. They never followed through either. Back when I had 5 acres to play with, I could have set up four plots of an acre each on my land and I could have done the primary soil prep with my BCS tiller. There were already markets for the prospective farmers to sell their produce within 25 miles – two of which I had started myself in Ferndale and Lynden. No interest. So, if someone really, really, really wants to fund something like this, here are some budget projections. All costs are measured in US dollars. Do your own conversions to sterling or euros per your own frame of reference.
Land – assumed to be already in hand, so $0 for land, taxes, etc. Land is also assumed to be tillable.
Land per family – 1 acre (.4 hectare) per family. This figure comes from my own experience that a person can comfortably work an acre in a 3000-hour year with mostly hand labor plus 5-10 gallons of gasoline for a tiller and a weed-whacker (strimmer). Long days in the summer, short days in the winter. A 3000-hour year includes all manual labor, plus transport time, plus time at the market, plus spreadsheet time. 3000 hours is 1.5 FTE (full-time equivalent = 2000 hours for a 52-week/year, 40-hour/week full-time job minus 2 weeks for vacation.
Working families – assumption is 2 FTE so the available hours jumps up to 6000 for two people on one acre. This is a built-in conservative estimate that accounts for the learning curve, even among motivated newbies. If you put 2 working adults on 2 acres, you risk catastrophic burnout. Keep in mind that the adults are likely to have at least one small child so it is good to build in a buffer for that reason too.
Crop costs per acre – $3000 for seed, fertilizer, tiller gas, market stall fees, and minimal advertising. This should generate $30,000 in food value per acre. These are NOT made-up numbers! They are based on my previous business as a market gardener.
Subsidized income per family – $40,000. This may seem low, but consider that a motivating factor will be allowing the family to keep its net income from the markets it goes to, plus any income from a CSA box scheme, selling to restaurants, farm stands, etc.
Mentor/motivator/gatekeeper – You will need an experienced farmer for each 10 families who can help them in the field, in the classroom with spreadsheets and crop/soil science, at the markets, and generally hold their hands. $60,000 would be the salary for this person for a year. Expect this person to spend 3000 hours per year on his/her 10 families. That is still only $20 per hour.
Start-up costs – Each 10 families will require a new walk-behind tiller that is reliable. This will be around $4000-5000 per tiller. A large truck will be required for each 10 families to get fill dirt, compost, building materials, deliver produce to restaurants and farmers markets, etc. This cost should be a minimum of $30,000 per 10 families. It is assumed that each family will have at least 1 vehicle that they can drive to the market on market days. Fertilizer and seed costs are mentioned previously in crop costs.
Housing – People will have to provide their own housing. Deposits and first/last month’s rent can be paid out of the large amount of startup capital and then amortized over the first year. If the funder of the whole scheme wants to build housing for workers, that is a whole ‘nother aspect and a whole new set of assumptions will be in play.
Minimum startup costs for 100 families.
$3000 crop costs x 100 = $300,000
$40,000 per family subsidized salary = $4 million
$60,000 per mentor/gatekeeper x 10 = $600,000
$5000 per tiller x 10 = $50,000
$30,000 truck x 10 = $300,000
Total costs for first year = $5.25 million. This is assuming the land is already available and is tillable.
$30,000 food value generated per acre for 100 families on 100 acres = $3 million
Losses = $2.25 million or $22,500 per acre. This is in the first year. Do you see why farmers are more than willing to cut corners and fall for “cheap fixes?” Do you see why bankers have their thumb on the farmer year-round?
Notice that the costs in the second year will be reduced. Also note that the publicity benefit for the benefactor will likely far exceed $2.25 million in added share value on his/her stock portfolio. A case in point is Bill Gates, who made far more money on his Microsoft shares once he started his philanthropic endeavors. Before philanthropy he was a multi-millionaire. After his philanthropy started, he became a multi-billionaire. That is why Jeff Bezos is giving money to George Monbiot’s project. He gets far more than he puts in just in public acclaim, burnishing his image, and distracting people from the harsh working conditions at Amazon warehouses.
These numbers and the inevitable loss of money should be familiar to anyone who tried starting a business growing food
Added thoughts:
Hand tools per family are a microscopic number and can easily be taken out of the crop cost per acre. Irrigation costs are something to consider also. My irrigation costs were minimal because we had our own well. Now I take water out of the stream at the bottom of our property. Some of the farmers who asked me for advice in Whatcom County years ago had severe irrigation problems. One group didn’t understand the lower flows with drip irrigation and kept their water on too long each day. Another admitted that he kept himself in a hole for years because he was too cheap to put in an irrigation system on rented land. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that any price you pay your mentor/gatekeepers will be worth it.
If anyone knows of a rich guy who wants to fund something like this, let me know. You will actually have to show up in southern France if you want my help, of course. But if you know Brad Pitt, he doesn’t live too far away and could afford to drive over for a lunch-time planning session.
Per Joe’s original post, if you did not pay the families a subsidized salary and had them build their own housing on your land given to you by the king, they could generate 3 million for a cost of 1.25 million. See how this feudalism stuff worked?
Delighted to see people chatting on my blog even on Christmas day! Let’s try to keep it polite amongst ourselves here though – I’d prefer us to avoid accusations of bullshit or hypocrisy in favour of more open probing of each others’ positions.
Agree with Joe on the dual nature of states. I’m sympathetic to the idea of kingship or statehood as banditry, the difference often largely being their success in legitimating themselves otherwise – but their ability to achieve that success is interesting in itself, and is best not explained away. More on that in the future I hope.
James Scott’s writing is relevant to all this. Philip mentioned his book ‘The Art of Not Being Governed’, which I draw on in ‘Finding Lights…’. His other ones like ‘Seeing Like A State,’ ‘Against the Grain’, and ‘The Moral Economy of the Peasant’ are also informative. I have my issues with some of his analyses of course, but by and large I think he was streets ahead of most people writing on global political economy. As a greenhorn graduate student I went to a seminar he held and was impressed at the way he unflappably held his own against a legion of supposedly more radical critics. A great role model.
Many thanks to Chris and all contributors to your offerings during ’25. They’ve been stimulating and inspiring in equal measure.
As someone with their house on the market ready to engage in establishing an agro-ecological enterprise, I’ll be fascinated to read more about the cost debate started above. Seems to me that the prospect of selling produce for £ sterling in the mainstream economy is going to get harder before it gets better.
An anecdote from the Christmas dinner table that might be of interest in the unlikely event that readers might want want some evidence that an era of free, “renewable” energy for all might not turn out so well.. My sister did up a house in Southern Morocco about 18 months ago including sinking a borehole 70 meters down, no problems – she was able to get water for the property and its garden. Since then there has been a profusion of solar powered pumps in the area that are sucking up all the water they can get and irrigating during the day (when the sun is shining). She can no longer get any water during the day, and reports that there are swathes of formerly productive orchards, across South Morocco now lying desiccated.
My Christmas reading suggestion: Roc Sandford, Burnt Rain. Short but packs a good punch.
There’s a reason I specified rain catchment rather than a well… of course, if there just isn’t enough rain that is still a problem, but it’s largely a “get a bigger storage tank” problem.
I agree. Where I live we normally get around 80″ of rain a year, plenty for just about any size catchment system. This year we are at 29″ for the year so far, with no rain in sight. I’m glad our catchment for drinking water is 50,000 gallons. We also have a small lined pond for non-potable utility and ag water of about 50,000 gallons.
29 inches was just enough to keep the pasture grasses from going dormant, but only because we started the year with the subsoil saturated with water. If we don’t get some big rains in the next few months, next year might be really bad.
Does anyone have any experience of building and using ferrocement water tanks for harvested rainwater for domestic supply? It’s my new vision for the coming year:)
And a happy new year to all!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uo0JAUWijM&list=RD3Uo0JAUWijM&start_radio=1
@simon H
No, but they sound interesting
There are several in my neighborhood. Are you looking for information about their long term reliability or how to build them? There are lots of YouTube videos about the latter.
I use corrugated steel tanks with liners. I have one tank that is 39 years old and still in excellent condition. The vast majority of catchment tanks in my area are this type. Some people use multiple polyethylene tanks, typically 4,000 gallons per tank. All my catchment collection building roofs are aluminum.
Hawaii County, where I live, prefers to build their public water tanks out of cast concrete, whereas the American Water Works Association standards call for welded steel tanks.
In my view the ideal tank would be constructed out of corrugated aluminum with a crosslinked polyethylene liner. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone makes them.
You can get stainless steel tanks but they are very expensive.
My first catchment tank was the most cost effective. It was made by using a bulldozer to gouge a trench in the earth about 50 ft long, ten feet wide and eight feet deep. This was lined with poly film and covered with a rodent-proof wooden roof structure. It worked fine, but the constant condensation on the structure of the roof caused it to deteriorate too rapidly.
I started to build an improved version using an earthen hole with a concrete block perimeter and metal roof, but due to there being too many rocks in the soil I switched to a corrugated metal tank with half of its height buried in the soil. Even if the buried part rusts away and the liner rests against the soil, it should still be OK. It has a free span metal roof and is now twenty years old and in excellent condition.
My first exposure to catchment tanks was in 1970 in the Peace Corps. We had access to a 5,000 gallon cast concrete tank, but it was about 150 ft from our dwelling so we had to carry all water in 5 gallon buckets to our house. That was my job. I rapidly learned that water is very heavy. In poor rural communities, a lot of time and effort is spent just carrying water from one place to another just like I had to do. I never want to do it again. HDPE and PVC piping are wonderful (so is gravity when it works for you).
Thanks Joe, and a happy new year to you.
I’ve ordered a book on their construction. As I live near a couple of cement factories it seems an obvious way to go, and should be much cheaper than a plastic tank or similar off-the-shelf product. Owing to the cold winters where I live, the tank would need to be dug in to the earth. It’s location also rules out any kind of mechanical digger, so it’ll be shovels at the ready come freeze thaw.
You mention polyethylene – wouldn’t such plastics leach over time and if so is this even a consideration? Then there’s the disposal/pollution aspect down the line – maybe that’s just me.
We have a well, but when the pump fails to draw (I should’ve used a submersible pump but didn’t) once the water level drops below about 9 metres, I’m in a similar situation to you in your Peace Corp days. It does make you at least conscious of just how much water gets used (not much), and how carefully it should be used. Years ago here, everyone used wells. I like the simplicity of a well – just muscle power, grit and maybe a little dynamite thrown in… One advantage was that guttering was unnecessary, as were rainwater tanks and assorted paraphernalia. It also tunes the user in to just what is happening down there at ground water level (oh, the mystery!), and perhaps makes rain events feel more significant – I think these are all good ways for people to connect with the natural world that have largely been lost nowadays. As the weather patterns seem to be more erratic however, it’s time to build a rainwater tank, which I hope will tide us over during any droughts.
(For anyone considering building or bringing a well back in to use, this subtitled German video might be of interest. It’s clearly a lost craft, that of bona fide well builder – for instance, just check out the size of the auger being used, around the 16-minute mark, to make a suction pipe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-b1px_axlA
I very much doubt you could find an auger that big these days, let alone the skill to use one. Needless to say, this does not augur well (sorry, couldn’t resist that). Hopefully I’m wrong. Cheers all!
Simon,
I’m not worried about polyethylene since what might outgas is only ethylene, something produced by ripening fruit and other natural processes.
What kind of well pump do you have? If it is a suction pump, it will not be able to lift from much more than 7m deep. You can always switch to a lift pump, but a hand pump will be limited by the weight of the water column.
It will be very difficult to construct a buried ferro-cement tank unless the hole is big enough to stand in outside the armature of the tank. You need access to both sides for plastering.
Simon wrote “… polyethylene – wouldn’t such plastics leach over time and if so is this even a consideration?”
From what I’ve read, the leaching of chemicals from polyethylene (PE, LDPE, HDPE) is not as bad as from PVC, but it can still occur at some level.
Plastic mulch films are problematic, and the leaching from “biodegradable” plastic mulch is even worse than conventional polyethylene film, according to papers with titles such as “Higher potential leaching of inorganic and organic additives from biodegradable compared to conventional agricultural plastic mulch film”, and “From soil to fork: Are mulch films releasing additives to the soil and contaminating our food?”.
However, ferrocement doesn’t necessarily avoid problems with leaching. Mortar cement can result in some leaching of heavy metals, according to a study titled “Leaching of chromium and lead from the cement mortar lining into the flowing drinking water shortly after pipeline rehabilitation”, among others. I’d try to avoid fly ash as an ingredient.
I steer clear of PVC (and ABS) as much as possible, but I couldn’t find a feasible alternative for my rainwater system piping, so I only purchased PVC pipes that were specifically rated for potable water (“PW” is marked along the pipe surface), which supposedly means it’s made from better resins with no lead content, etc.
Some people use PVC tarps (repurposed billboards) in their gardens, to cover beds. I think this is a mistake, because PVC tarps typically contain phthalates (endocrine disrupters) as plasticizers which can leach into the soil and water. (Phthalates are supposedly not used as plasticizers for the manufacture of polyethylene, so polyethylene tarps should have much less leaching potential).
Some “phthalate-free” PVC products are now available, but the alternative plasticizers can still have health hazards. And PVC nonetheless “relies upon chlorine chemistry that forms toxic byproducts from its manufacture to its disposal” and “should be a choice of last resort”, according to this report:
https://habitablefuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/92-phthalate-free-plasticizers-in-pvc.pdf
“In response to consumer and regulatory pressures, PVC building products manufacturers have begun to offer phthalate-free products… The available data suggest that non-phthalate plasticizers present fewer human health hazards than phthalates. This is not the same as saying that there are no health hazards associated with these non-phthalate plasticizers… Even without phthalate plasticizers, the lifecycle of PVC has inherent toxicities that cannot be avoided. At its core, PVC relies upon chlorine chemistry that forms toxic byproducts from its manufacture to its disposal…Due to its overall human health and environmental impacts from manufacturing to disposal, PVC should be a choice of last resort in the selection of building materials.”
Thanks again Joe, and Steve L… Maybe I will just dig the hole, then crawl into in and stay there in a foetal position:)
But no! We have to live in this world. Regarding the use of plastics in this or any other construction, I will be trying to avoid them where possible for reasons Steve’s information outlines. Maybe that could be viewed as ‘perfect being the enemy of good’, but these are all considerations to weigh up going forward, or down, as I dig.
The ‘plastering both sides’ of a ferrocement tank is a speed bump, but won’t necessarily kibosh the idea. It may just mean a narrower tank.
With the well, Joe, yes we do use a suction pump, a Danish Grundfos Rolls-Royce model, cheap (I thought) at a few hundred pounds, and much quieter than the Gardena model it replaced. It has a nice, anvil-like shape and solidity to it, and has been trouble-free for years, but can only do what the laws of physics allow. I’ve given it house room in a frost-free corner and the noises it makes as it works convey how pleasingly full the well is, or how desperately we need some rain. The time lag from rain event to replenished well also holds the interest. We do have a hand pump, a semi-rotary double-acting wing pump, also Danish (when I purchased it the vendor told me the only problem with these pumps is “they never wear out”). I bought this as emergency back-up, but I’ve never had to use it as we usually just winch the well bucket instead. The rainwater cistern will hopefully mitigate any well-water shortage problems, and the harvested rainwater will mainly be used for washing purposes. Again, years ago, rainwater – naturally ‘soft’ – used to be used for washing hair. I read that the alkalinity of cement buffers the acidity of rainwater, acidity which may speed the corrosion of any ferrous metal it comes in contact with, which could be seen as a boon if choosing cement as the container.
… And also on the list, thinking of futures with and without water, does anyone have any experience of and tips for an indoor compost toilet (waterless, most likely DIY)?
Simon;
Here are a couple observations on waterless human waste recycling. From my occasional blog.
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2021/01/return-of-pissoir.html#comment-form
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-new-low.html
Thanks all… we’ve been doing the indoor wee bucket for years, but I’m now thinking of going ‘all in’ on an indoor composting toilet. The Jenkins method is good but I ideally wanted to avoid dealing with a bucket a day. As Chris outlines, some sort of closet within the house envelope that can be periodically emptied from outside will be what I’m after, even if it happens to be the parkiest room within the house owing to its location and design.
Happy Christmas and New Year (though late)!
I bought a small farm (five hectares of agricultural land and five hectares of forest) last year and am very happy with that choice. I wasn’t unhappy in the city, I just didn’t realize how much better it could be! I am lucky enough to have a job where I can work from home a lot, so I can still give time to the farm. In our first year, we started growing vegetables for the household and got enough in some categories to fill our needs fully, but we’ll ramp up next year in other categories. We also planted lots of fruit trees and bushes and got twelve adorable and funny ducks to eat slugs and lay eggs. One of my housemates is starting a small vegetable-growing business next year. We’re also going to start experimenting with cereals in a small way, and are talking about maybe getting a few cows in 2027. So yeah, I am one happy smallholder, who in consequence has had no time yet to read your latest book. : )
Congratulations, Elin!
Happy (belated) Xmas and (preemptive) New Year to one and all.
I’ve enjoyed all the debates over the last year and looking forward to more of the same in 2026.
@Chris
Yes, I get your point/comment about talking about Ukraine and geopolitics from my/our sofas. It’s a different proposition for those with “skin in the game”.
But then again………. I have this uncomfortable feeling that the same is true when we all discuss small farm futures and the impending collapse of industrial civilization.
(From my sofa whilst drinking Guatamalan coffee and eating avocado on toast)
Whilst discussing what post industrial society might look like, we don’t really have any “skin in the game” (yet!!!).
We are all still living in the “bossom of modernity”. None of us are truly living a SFF. Our existences are still totally reliant on modernities comforts.
We can all talk the talk, but I feel that we (me most definitely included) are hopelessly naive about what a SFF would actually mean.
(The experience of witnessing extreme acts of violence on loved ones for example)
But it doesn’t stop me from wanting to have the debates.
(My particular point of interest at the moment are perennial crops. Probably because I am lazy!
Loving the stuff on Nature’s Lost Vault. Going to try some of the plants in tubs in the Spring.)
Also looking forward to hearing about your debate with Tom Murphy.
I’m guessing it’s along the lines of “Was farming a bad idea from the very start?”
John
You might enjoy an online shop called The Backyard Larder; they update every Monday I think, you can sign up for a weekly email, and they mostly sell perennials. If you want Jerusalem artichokes in particular, though, just give me a shout and I’ll send you some (probably in February, I’m away most of the next month). I can send oca too if you like, or you could buy it from Real Seeds. (I think they sometimes have yacon, also — worth trying if you want root veg, I did overwinter mine outside last year but that was in the back garden which has the London heat island effect, for guaranteed success you probably want to bring the tubers in and store them somewhere frost-free, like dahlias… which also produce an edible tuber, though I haven’t gotten around to trying them for myself!)
How are your biochar experiments going? Have you made any interesting pickles recently?
As for skin in the game… I work with (and grow some food for) people who don’t have enough to eat, as well as with refugees. I’ve known people who died of malnutrition. Chris posted about his friend Mick who is going to prison. If you don’t know protesters who have encountered police violence you probably don’t know all that many protesters. There’s a fair amount I don’t post about here in detail for reasons of privacy, but as a survivor of childhood domestic abuse I have already witnessed cruelty and violence to loved ones. Is my gardening and foraging an optional hobby? Maybe, insofar as in the event of catastrophic crop failure I’ll still be able to purchase something to eat, but… it was sure helpful in 2023 (when my spouse was unemployed for a few months) to not have to worry about groceries, even if my concern at the time was more rooted in my childhood experiences of food scarcity than in the reality of our financial situaiton (though a year and a half on we haven’t really recovered financially from that time, which is not wonderful.) Is that skin in the game or not?
In any case, someone has to grow the food I eat, it may as well be me, and one of the reasons I am less worried about e.g. the cost of living crisis in terms of the effects on my own household is that we do have all this allotment produce to eat, so we’re somewhat insulated from the worst of the price fluctuations. I’m not trying to claim that I’m super prepared, or anything… in fact, I’m sure a fast societal collapse would be a shock to me, and I would have to make some rapid and substantial adaptations to get through it. I’m also sure that it wouldn’t be the first major upheaval in my life.
I think it’s helpful to throw ideas around about what a congenial future, or even just a less-terrible one, might look like, while also remembering that we don’t have access to the full story on what’s happening right now in most areas of the world. I have said before and I will probably say again that I don’t know all the details of what my life will be like in the future but I do know I will probably want to eat food and wear clothing and drink water, and probably so will the people around me — so it seems prudent to know how to address those needs for myself and my community in as many different ways as possible. If the worst happens, well, I probably wasn’t going to survive that anyway. If things go much better than we expect, I have some enjoyable hobbies.
@Kathryn
Thanks for the artichoke offer. I guess I can find them local if I have a look around. Not aware of oca. Will check them out. I think Nature’s Lost Vault has an episode on them.
I guess that it’s the plus side of that globalisation going forward. All these plants from around the world are now available to all.
(The acorns are planted. I’ll let you know if they make an appearance in the Spring)
Biochar retort melted last time I lit it. 1,400°c!!!!!!
I’ve patched the hole but haven’t lit it since. It’s on the 2026 list as I need to get rid of all the wood I’ve chopped ready.
Latest fermentation is garlic in honey. It’s very tasty, but I keep forgetting to use it on stuff.
When I mention extreme violence, I’m thinking of the kind that warlords/bandits/Romans were dishing out. Decapitation etc. murder to intimidate and rule. Quick and easy way to break up a civic assembly!
Yes, I agree. Learn some new skills. Try to future proof as much as possible, keep fingers crossed and see what transpires.
That’s about all we can do.
HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL !
Simon,
The best source of information about indoor waterless waste systems is The Humanure Handbook, by Joseph Jenkins.
Basically, all you need is a 5 gallon plastic bucket with a snap on toilet seat (about $14 at Amazon) and a separate bucket storing some carbonaceous material for covering the waste deposited into the bucket. After a few uses the contents are moved to an outdoor compost bin and the bucket is rinsed for reuse.
I couldn’t talk my wife into using this system for all wastes, but we do use it to collect urine alone, which is where almost all of the nitrogen is anyway.
Happy new year folks – and congratulations Elin, it’s nice to hear these stories.
I’ll try to pick up on a few of the threads here in another post shortly.
Just on Simon’s question about waterless indoor DIY compost toilets, we have several such beasts on our holding, although they’re only semi-indoor – more along the lines of an outhouse integrated into the outline structure of the houses. You don’t get rained on or need to put your shoes on to use them, at any rate. Vent pipes, fly control, rodent control, compost removal and solid/liquid separation/management are things to think about. The Jenkins book that Joe mentions is a good one, and in some ways his system is preferable, but it involves more day to day management.
I’ll touch on the Newberry article!
I guess I get what he’s trying to say, that the peak oil term was it’s own worst enemy, and of course mis-framing or intentional misunderstanding had the mainstream shrug it off. But recognition that oil with positive EROEI is in inevitable decline, be it shark fin shaped descent, or slowly undulating plateau or any other chart shape, the recognition is once again growing.
Seemed a bit derivative to me, an amalgam of idea strands already explored by several people in this space trying to describe their particular aspect of the elephant.
I was seeing echoes of Tim Morgan over at SEEDS, some Ugo Bardi, some Honest Sorcerer, Charles Hugh Smith, even a bit of CACTUS = Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System. A newer idea being mulled over at one of the less traveled corners of the doom space.
Point is, it was primarily at the high level, systemic way of understanding what is happening, but no new insights for me anyway. Not sure I’d even use the term singularity. More of a phase change or one way transition. If he gets anyone to change their ways, then it’s good. If not, just one more Cassandra.
Thanks for the blog post Chris. I appreciate your contributions to this “wounded Earth”.