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 September 22, 2026 | 54 Comments
I mentioned that I was going to reproduce my article in The Land 37 here. Well, it’s coming right up below (it was published in The Land with the title ‘Rentiers Redux’).
The article is essentially a review of Nick Bano’s book Against Landlords, albeit with some wider analysis and context. I’ll probably sketch in a bit more of that context, either in the comments section below or in a follow-up post.
Meanwhile, to update another semi-regular feature of this blog, here’s my current/recent reading:
Luke Kemp Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse
Lyndal Roper Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasant’s War
Vaclav Smil How To Feed The World: A Factful Guide
Perhaps I’ll review these books in future posts if anyone’s interested – particularly the Kemp one, which bears directly on the usual themes of this site.
Right, over to landlords and landlordism –
The basics of Britain’s housing crisis are well-known. Absurdly high house prices facing anybody trying to establish themselves as a homeowner, and absurdly high rental prices facing everyone else – if they can even find a rental property among the second homes, holiday lets and Airbnbs. At the bottom of the economic distribution, homelessness and entrenched poverty.
The crisis of farm property is similar, if less well known – the price of both bare agricultural land and farm dwellings has rocketed in lockstep with the more general housing crisis, while food prices have increased by … not so much. The idea of servicing the costs of farm property by producing basic food or fibre products on it has become a quaint fancy for most. As with the housing crisis, so with the farm property crisis and the various crises within farming more generally – all manifestations of the wider unravelling in present times.
Into these crises, or at least the first one, steps Nick Bano. With his on-the-ground experience as a London housing barrister and a weight of accompanying Marxist theory, his book Against Landlords: How To Solve the Housing Crisis (Verso, 2025) offers a diagnosis of the problem and, as the subtitle implies, a solution. While it’s no criticism that his solution has little to say on the crises in farming –writers need to keep their books within manageable bounds, after all – nevertheless, in seeing Britain’s housing crisis largely as a problem of housing and economic policy, his solution isn’t adequate to the challenges of present times. This is easier to see from the perspective of farming and farm property, as I’ll try to show here.
Bano considers three possible explanations for Britain’s housing crisis. First, an excess of demand over supply that pushes up the price of housing – we need more houses! Second, financialisation. An excess of liquid money floating around the global economy finds its way into property, driving up prices – we need less footloose capital! Third, landlordism. Landlord-friendly politicians pass laws that tip the balance in favour of landlord interests over tenants – for example, the advent of the assured shorthold tenancy (AST) in the 1988 Housing Act, with its provision for no-fault evictions. We need less landlord-friendly policymaking!
Bano squarely favours this third explanation, ASTs being the particular object of his ire. He’s dismissive of the other two – rightly so for the most part in relation to the first one, the explanation of choice for housing developers and economic growth obsessed politicians. Even so, changing household structures and the over-concentration of Britain’s economy in southeast England mean supply shortages can’t be ruled out entirely.
The neglect of the second explanation is more problematic. It’s well understood that when relatively unlimited money confronts relatively limited land the result is monopoly rents on land and housing in excess of competitive market value. A simple test of Bano’s view that ASTs are the root of the problem would be to compare rent and land value changes in situations where ASTs don’t exist. This can be done without straying beyond Britain’s shores by looking at agricultural land prices, or at house prices in Scotland with its less landlord-friendly legislative environment. The same problem of monopoly rent exists in both cases.
Looking beyond Britain, similar if perhaps often less acute housing crises are a worldwide phenomenon, despite the great variety of legislative frameworks around tenure. Emphasizing British exceptionalism, Bano observes that more than half of Britain’s net worth comprises land values, whereas the proportion is only about half of that in Germany. Another way of saying this is that the country with the third largest economy in the world, the industrial export powerhouse of western Europe, still relies on rackety land values for about a quarter of its total worth.
Why focus, then, so singularly upon ASTs and upon overtly political landlord power? Largely, I think, because Bano’s Marxism inclines him to emphasise class conflict, and specifically a dualistic clash between the landless and the owners of capital, which Marxist theory is always anxious to sniff out as both the root cause and the ultimate solution of every problem.
It’s not that this lacks all plausibility. Inequality has increased. A growing group of have-nots are obliged to transfer much of their income to dwindling numbers of haves. Government policies have acted in the latter’s favour. Bano writes, “These sorts of disparities expose the folly of the ideological shift that took place in the 1980s. Before then, governments tended to disdain any ‘excessive’ profiteering based on property speculation. This was not a moral standpoint but an economic one: over-investment in landed property diverts money away from industry and other, properly productive activity.” (p.148) This speculative goldrush inaugurated in the 1980s has led to younger renters bankrolling the later-life wellbeing of older rentiers, but “the trouble with Thatcherism … is that eventually you run out of other people’s money” (p.98).
On the one hand, this seems like an old battle that Bano is still fighting. The reference to Thatcherism is telling, since the eponymous prime minister left power nearly forty years ago. Perhaps you could argue that governments in Britain and elsewhere have been essentially Thatcherite ever since, but then that would suggest this wall-to-wall Thatcherism probably isn’t just some foolish ideological relic of the 1980s so much as an enduring structural reality. And indeed here we come to the other hand – this is the deeper nature of capitalism. It’s always been about raiding the collective piggy bank of other people or other organisms to return more capital to the few.
In that sense, there’s no pre-1980s happy place to return to. But things did change structurally in the 1980s with the globalization and financialization – effectively, the virtualisation – of the capitalist economy that some call neoliberalism, and that Margaret Thatcher among others helped initiate. Britain’s current housing crisis is merely one local result of this. Like many, I’d be delighted to see the back of it, but the notion that a government could restore ‘properly productive’ activity to the economy by damping overheated property speculation and thus restoring a national industrial base misses the depth of the hole that capitalism and neoliberalism have got us into globally.
Agriculture was once a ‘properly productive activity’ but the globalization and mechanization of an earlier era dumped multitudes out of it into the prodigious, but temporary, growth machine of industrialisation – most recently, the thirty years of postwar, industrial, wage-fuelled prosperity that the French call ‘les trente glorieuses’.
People too often assume that this industrial prosperity is some normal state of capitalist affairs rather than a historical exception, but we’ve now reached a similar situation of overcapacity with global industry, which for the most part is no longer ‘properly productive’ – except of carbon emissions, grandiose ‘development’ projects and pointless consumer tat. That leaves financialisation and the current speculative cannibalism of past production that will eventually destroy itself. When it does, we won’t see the return of some kinder and more productive version of the pre-Thatcherite 1970s with decent jobs and housing for all, perhaps with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn or Zack Polanski in the role of wised-up Jim Callaghans of the latter-day. Instead, we’ll see the global crisis – geopolitical, economic and biophysical – that’s already upon us getting a whole lot worse.
Bano is too keen an observer of contemporary realities to succumb entirely to the seductive simplicities of his private landlord vs tenant class dualism. He notes, for example, that state and charitable agencies such as local authorities and housing trusts aggressively prosecute their own landlordly power. He appreciates that property ownership must be understood in the context of the parlous household finances of ordinary working-class and middle-class families. This is a story of increasingly inadequate wages, pensions, childcare and elder care, and of intergenerational tensions over inheritance, where the institutions that contain and enable the decencies of ordinary modern life – employers, occupational pension funds, state agencies, lenders – are deeply enmeshed with the monopoly rent of residential property that he deplores. And he’s aware that the average landlord is in their late fifties with a median income (excluding rents) of what he rightly calls a ‘relatively modest’ £24,000, suggesting that a major group of rentiers are older people who haven’t done especially well out of the job market but who have accrued some capital over their lifetimes and are using it to try to keep afloat.
His appreciation of these subtleties isn’t enough, however, to stop him sticking the knife in. Landlords, Bano writes, “walk among us” and “it is difficult not to think of the urban myth that you are never more than six feet away from a rat” (p.72). His book is endorsed by geography professor Danny Dorling, who calls it “a devastating … attack on the bastard landlords and every lie, nastiness and evil that they represent”. Since Dorling’s employer, the University of Oxford, is one of the country’s larger landlords, with the value of its property portfolio approaching £10 billion, and since its academics are entitled to a pension from the Universities Superannuation Scheme funded in part out of monopoly rents from private property, you’d think the good professor might have taken a less venomous and more structural position on how landlordism percolates the contemporary British economy.
When people are compared to hated animal pests, or when nastiness and evil are imputed to whole classes of people in society, I can’t help thinking about the genocides, pogroms and enforced miseries blighting so much recent history that were often framed in similar terms. Regimes inspired by Marx have been prominent in this shameful history, their prime targets often peasants, petty entrepreneurs, smalltime landlords and other ‘petit bourgeois’ types that don’t fit with their grandiose historical visions. Too often, Marxism’s odd blend of supposedly ‘scientific’ structural analysis along with an individualised moralism has combined to justify especially pitiless forms of oppression. Should apparently serious analysts who understand how an economic system operates structurally, incentivizing people to keep their heads above the water where they can by extracting monopoly rent, really be resorting to this highly-charged name calling of individual moral failing – rats, bastards – when people duly respond to the incentives they’re offered?
I’ve noticed this individualised moralism at various talks and meetings I’ve been to recently, usually framed along the lines that “our landlords don’t care if our houses are full of damp and black mould”. The deeper point, though, is that even if your landlord does care about it very much and tries to ensure your home is a decent place to live, they’re still benefitting from monopoly rent and their niceness or otherwise as a person is irrelevant. Another deeper point is that even if you’re not directly a landlord but, say, a teacher with a mortgage on a private home who expects to earn a pension on retirement and enough money for a nice annual holiday, you’re still a beneficiary in numerous ways of monopoly rent that’s unfairly structured globally – which is why your situation is probably more prosperous than a counterpart doing the same job in a poor rural country of sub-Saharan Africa.
In any case, while this language of rats and bastards is almost enough for me to fling Against Landlords in the bin, and is certainly enough for me to hope the likes of Bano and Dorling never get anywhere near political power, nevertheless the housing crisis is real and, like the broader poly-crisis of which it’s a part, creates real suffering. Something must be done. But what?
Bano’s answers involve pushing back against landlord-friendly policies and ultimately making the centralised state the provider of low-cost housing. It’s in keeping with the general drift of modern policymaking toward corporate (public or private), high-volume, low-margin approaches that generate a large and dependent working class in whose interests the state claims to rule. It’s unlikely that the purveyors of global neoliberalism would tolerate such an anti-accumulative move, but if it did happen it would certainly help even out the distribution of income and wealth, albeit with lower average prosperity overall.
Lower average prosperity will be a reality sooner or later anyway – the problem with the current neoliberal global economy indeed is that you do eventually run out of other people’s money. In that sense, Bano’s solution doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, even if more local or municipal ways of going about it might be preferable. But housing is only one part of the picture. It’s not as if a future world is likely in which there will be affordable social housing for all, while every other aspect of modern life stays the same. The poly-crisis involves more radical challenges to the way we make our livelihoods.
This becomes clearer when we look at the housing crisis from an agrarian perspective. Worldwide, few people who work the land to produce basic food or fibre crops make much of a living from it. This exposes poor farmers of the Global South to risks of poverty and hunger, while in the richer countries the mantra for farmers who haven’t already quit the sector for something more lucrative is farm diversification – B&Bs, campsites, fishing lakes, eco-courses, the stacking of micro-enterprises and the like. It’s worth noting that most forms of farm diversification, as in these examples, involve monopoly rent from property. Generally, there’s a connection between low food prices and high rents, mediated by historical processes of colonialism, enclosure, globalization and unsustainable mechanization which benefits few people, and especially not poor people.
Bano touches on this issue and its importance in passing when he mentions Lord Pembroke, who in 1896 found that his outgoings on his agricultural estates exceeded his income from them, with only his ground rents from his urban property keeping him in the black. Bano calls this late nineteenth century predicament of Lord Pembroke’s ‘a time of crisis’ but that crisis has barely diminished in following years. It’s now the chronic norm in neoliberal land economics. The same unpromising land economics apply today to less exalted landowners than the late Lord Pembroke – for example, those of us who own a few acres and have tried to earn some income by producing some food from it.
I’d argue that a more radical, and urgently necessary, solution to the housing-and-land-and-sustainable-livelihood poly-crisis than the government providing low cost urban housing would be a long-term policy of land reform and agricultural training that gives ordinary people access to a bit of land to build a house and grow some food for themselves – something along the lines of the old call for ‘three acres and a cow’. Or, as I argued in The Land 31, something along the lines of the distributist movement that emerged out of Catholic Social Teaching and from the ambiguous legacy of writers like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in early twentieth century times when land reform was on the agenda as a way of keeping ordinary people happy, rather than the present desperate trickle-down economics of perpetual growth. The best way to overcome the problem of landlordism is for everyone to have the opportunity of being their own landlord, with long-term security of tenure to generate their own livelihood, and limits on speculative gain from land. Better, I think, than everyone having a single landlord in the form of the state.
Nowadays, the landed aristocratic heirs to the likes of Lord Pembroke make returns on their rural property by stuffing them full of exotic animals, or by allowing – at a price – the rest of us to indulge our inexplicable taste for traipsing through fancy rooms and gawping at furniture where royal arses have sat. We lesser rural landowners try to figure out our own bargain basement versions of this. It’s right to bemoan the state of a world in which this has become the only realistic way that rural property owners great and small can stay afloat, but moralistic polemics ‘against landlords’ don’t get to the root of the problem, not least because everybody who benefits from monopoly rents – i.e. pretty much everyone in a country like Britain – is in some measure part of the problem.
Let me borrow from an old Labour Party slogan and its attempt to defang Conservative barbs about its do-gooding ways in respect of crime by making the issue structural: ‘Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime’. Instead of being ‘against landlords’ it might be better to be against the causes of landlordism, or against the causes of monopoly rent – from which most of us in the rich world benefit in historically hidden ways. So this means in some sense being against ourselves, or at least against the way that we make a living.
In the future, more people are going to have to generate livelihoods from food and fibre production to serve local needs. Somehow, in the face of the multifaceted contemporary crisis, we’re going to have to create a peopled agroecological landscape in which farmers can raise the capital to build and maintain small farm infrastructures, make a living from farming, hand on skills and property to younger generations and retire with dignity.
Yet, too often, the ‘against landlords’ mindset gets in the way of addressing this. Recently, we had some students visiting our market garden for a permaculture design exercise. My wife and I set the market garden up from scratch nearly twenty years ago, although it’s now run by a younger grower for his own profit at zero rent and with various implicit subsidies from us. Standard critiques of monopoly rent usually distinguish between the ground rent arising from the purely monopolistic or speculative aspect of property ownership, and that part of the rent arising from improvements made by the landowner. In urban residential property, the former component is usually much the most dominant, whereas anyone who’s built up a horticultural enterprise from bare agricultural land is probably aware of the financial, mental and time cost involved. But all this and more was lost on one of our visiting permaculture students who felt we weren’t adequately supporting our grower, and effectively ought to be paying him to grow food on our land – we were, after all, ‘landlords’, so it was the least we should be doing.
So much for a ‘permanent agriculture’ design that assumes landowners can or should conjure money out of financialised capital to prop up a low-income farm enterprise. But here lies the magical thinking that arises with too much ‘against landlord’ fire in the belly, and not enough ‘against landlordism’ or ‘against monopoly rent’ cool thinking in the head. I can appreciate the anger of young people who see no route toward secure land access, but anger alone doesn’t provide answers as to how we get from the existing, speculatively virtualised neoliberal economy to that agroecological world of modest capital accumulation in service of succeeding generations spending their lives farming.
Bano recognises that rather than a rational, policy-driven ratcheting down of overheated property values the coming reality check is more likely to arise from a financial crash, a crisis of capitalist accumulation, that sweeps small-time landlords out of their property income, the children of homeowners out of their expected inheritances, and poor people out of their jobs, while large-scale, corporate capital gains the spoils. Which is another reason why his old-fangled emphasis on class conflict between landlord and tenant or ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ seems less to the point than the emerging conflict between large-scale capital and everyone else.
I wish I knew how to turn this conflict into the agroecological world of petty landownership that we need, but I don’t. Hence, a confession: as we approach retirement age, my wife and I have turned to residential letting in lieu of the occupational pension benefits we didn’t earn as growers (benefits that in any case are rarely innocent of monopoly rent from property). I’m not particularly happy about thus becoming the kind of ‘accidental landlord’ that Bano scorns, but nor do I ‘cringe’ about it as he believes I should. Partly, this is because we’ve found ways to create some social benefits through it rather than trying to extract maximum returns. But it’s more that the contemporary economy’s cannibalistic over-valuation of itself and under-valuation of real economic goods like renewably grown food ultimately makes it hard not to be either a pauper or a rentier.
In earlier times, commercialisation prompted counter-movements dedicated to voluntary poverty, like the mendicant religious orders of medieval Europe. Being a pauper may not be so bad if it’s actively chosen as part of a collective spiritual movement that’s supported by the wider society. Unfortunately, we don’t really have anything like it in contemporary times – essentially, there’s the hard path of individual voluntary poverty, or there’s economic rent. It’s little surprise that there are so many rats and bastards around these days.
Eventually, though, the system will run out of other people’s money, as well as much of the value that nature provides us for free. That’s the point at which it will have been good to have arranged secure and widespread access to land for the production of local, low-impact food and fibre – goods with ultimate value. Unfortunately, that’s not the path we’re currently on, but when it comes to the crunch the communities that do best are likely to be ones where farmers, foresters, landowners, workers, artisans, tenants, homeowners, pensioners, parents and children are able to renegotiate cooperatively the terms of their economic relationships. Bano basically grasps this, but unfortunately opts for an oversimplified model of Marxist class struggle that’s unlikely to help deliver it.
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Chris, this is the best blog about farming in the world. Thank you very much for all this information. Just bought your ebook. I’m curious what do you do now? How could I reach you? Could not find you in Linkedin… would love to pick your brain.
I remember reading about the arrangement you have with the younger grower on your land in your book as well. I find it curious – zero rent, is there more to the deal if you don’t mind elaborating? If I were to offer part of my land to a younger grower for zero rent, which I might have to do one day, I would want to work in some additional exchange. At least access to “all I can eat” from what they are growing. I would probably also want to establish that they must improve the land as they go, or at least have it as fertile as it was when they started.
In your fictitious story you wrote about a character losing their land to the government. I can see this being a future risk. I think the best defense of this is engaging with community on your land – mini carnivals, bees, frolics. That way, you might have more buffers to help keep that land in the hands of the community. It’s not so much being a landlord, as allowing participation, giving and sharing.
You certainly aren’t the only person I know who has had to resort to residential letting to make ends meet.
I think there is a difference between being a landlord to make ends meet, and using the rent from one property to buy another, which you rent out in order to buy yet another, and so on.
The lenders for buy-to-let mortgages do quite well out of that kind of thing, too, I think; and that’s where it gets into every pension fund and investment and so on.
A (highly improbable) policy solution might be something like:
1) corporations are not allowed to own property for residential rent, and there are steep limits on how much they can own for commercial rent purposes (co-operatives, though, can own property in proportion to the number of members they have)
2) Individuals who own property for rent pay an increasing tax which maxes out at 100% of rental income somewhere around the “owning ten houses” point
3) mortgage lending for second homes, buy-to-let, and so on has interest rates capped at some very low rate; this would make it somewhat easier for individuals to borrow to buy a second home, but it would also seriously eat into the profits the banking sector get from these mortgages.
This would mean that people in a situation where they need to rely on residential letting in order to make ends meet would still be able to do so, but the big corporate landlords would have to break up, transition to some kind of cooperative model, or sell off their stock.
It’s about as unlikely as my “nobody gets to own more than 100 acres of land” scheme, of course: it would be wildly unpopular. And I’m sure there would be problems with it, perverse incentives or just consequences I haven’t thought of.
Meanwhile: I am at theological college. I am ridiculously homesick, but starting to find my feet a bit. My beloved spouse keeps forgetting to pick aubergines and peppers from the allotment, but he’ll be coming up to visit this weekend and I am hoping he will bring a care package of tomatoes. I have had permission from one of the monks to gather various fruit he has left behind — so now I have a large quantity of figs in a tiny refrigerator and am trying to figure out what on earth to do with them given the very, very basic cooking facilities available. I think I might try to dehydrate some of them in the oven. The apple trees up here have had a much better year than my ones in London, and I’ve been enjoying eating apples, and some late plums, and grapes.
My room has a south-facing window looking out onto a cherry tree, it’s going to be absolutely glorious in spring.
A great review Chris. I love your reviews that weave together the critical and personal. This one made me think of that Specter of Marx theme, which seems as valid as ever. We’ve got to come up with viable intellectual alternatives to Marxism for a post-consumerist world and politics – which is the broader arch of much of your writing. And doing it with careful and reflexive engagements with Marxist oriented contemporary work as you do in this review is very helpful to me and any others I’m sure.
There’s hints of Georgism in here and I wonder if and when a Georgist revival will make an appearance in mainstream political critique. I hope more people engage with his ideas in present day settings as I want to better understand the logic of his economics which seem much better suited to a small farm future than Marxism.
Thanks for these responses – some excellent comments and questions here. I’ll try to respond within the next week or so – either with a longer comment or with a new post giving more background.
Richard, thanks and welcome. There’s a contact form on this site through which you can reach me. I’m not always great at responding quickly to emails but I will do my best!
First of all, I have never been a landlord and I don’t plan to be one, so I’m clearly not defending my actions with this comment.
The author Nick Bano is apparently a practicing lawyer in the UK, and his lumping together of landlords as despicable people reminds me of this line from Shakespeare:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Tenants can be stuck between a rock and a hard place, and so can the people who need a lawyer while not being able to afford their typically sky-high fees. Lawyers generally benefit from monopoly pricing, arguably more so than landlords.
Speaking of simplistic “solutions” to monopolies, perhaps Bano would give landlords a pass if a few percent of their potential monthly rents are provided pro bono?
(From the Global Pro Bono Hub: “The UK Collaborative Plan for Pro Bono (‘UKCP’) is a profession-led initiative for law firms in the UK. Each of the >80 participating law firms has a strong institutional commitment to pro bono and access to justice… The UKCP also incorporates an aspirational target of 25 pro bono hours on average per lawyer in the UK each year.” For the 84 law firms responding in 2025, their average number of pro bono hours per lawyer was reportedly only 15.8 hours per year, with a range from zero to 127 hours.)
https://www.globalprobonohub.com/resource/gpbh/uk-collaborative-plan-for-pro-bono
A quick response to a few points here –
Mike, re our grower yes initially we did charge a small rent but then when we saw the good work he was doing and the struggle of making it work financially we decided to waive it. So yes to the need for quid pro quos in these kind of arrangements. I guess you could say we’ve just offloaded the forgone income onto our tenants elsewhere, but the reality is that the amount we were charging/could charge for the market garden is still peanuts relative to the money flow in the residential/salaried system.
Agreed also on the dangers of losing land to corporate or government players – as per George Monbiot’s veiled threats along those lines in his ‘Cruel fantasies’ piece (more on that soon – sorry!) Absolutely agree on the need to integrate rural/agrarian land into communities for all sorts of good reasons, building in buffers against expropriation being one of them.
Kathryn, interesting suggestions – I’m no great shakes as an economist in thinking through all the positive and perverse incentives of different policy regimens (then again, neither are economists as a rule!) but on the face of it your suggestions make a lot of sense to me. I’m not sure that they’d be wildly unpopular – wildly unpopular with politicians and powerful interests perhaps, but not so much with ordinary people and landlords. Which brings out a point I could have made more explicit in my post – instead of a Marxist opposition between tenant and landlord, consider the shape of a populist world in which tenants and petty landlords are allied against the owners and controllers of larger-scale capital. I fear, though, that the drift of policy is going to make smalltime landlords less common, and corporate landlords more common – which will probably decrease the worst excesses of private landlordism but also its best possibilities, including that interesting tenant/landlord alliance.
Thanks also for keeping us informed on your new directions!
Tim B – yes, I’m broadly sympathetic to Georgism and land value taxation, although I’ve written a bit critically about aspects of it here in the past, to the ire of some Georgists. The problem as I see it is that LVT pushes people into maximising monetary income from a given use-class, which would make more socially embedded arrangements like the one we have with our grower difficult. There’s a larger discussion here about quantitative, monetary arrangements vis-à-vis socially embedded, personalist arrangements. There are potential difficulties with both, but I increasingly think the latter is the lesser evil. Hard to make it work in the present world though, as I’ve found!
Steve L – ha, excellent parallel! I’d certainly favour capping both landlord and lawyer income at some appropriate level. Or pushing harder at the pro bono route, which is the equivalent of the socially embedded and personalist kind of landlordism mentioned above.
Breaking news here is that the behemoth football team Manchester City have been found guilty of numerous financial offences. Apparently their chief defending lawyer charges £5,000 per hour, although that works out as lower pay than most of their footballers. It’s a different world. And one that I don’t believe is destined to last.
Yes, the difficulty earning a real income with growing food is well known to me. And I re listened to your book several times, I think it’s chapter 8 on this subject. I expect there are similarities between our home towns – a local component and a very tourist component which ebb and flow with the weather. I’ve learned to try to cater to both groups – berries and popcorn for the tourists, and hardy nutritious foods for the locals. The tourists seem to have this YOLO lifestyle and spend like there is no tomorrow, the locals are much more tight with spending, so hard to walk that line. Strawberries are THE crowd favourite, hard work, but they are so rare to find grown on a small scale people are usually happy to pay the premium for no chemicals.
Next year I’m getting into dry beans – lots of heritage and interest there especially with people looking for proteins outside of meat. Shelling is the bottleneck, but I think I will invite the community out for a “bean frolic” and have some fun with it.
Mike, we do the same here on our small market garden/farm. We are trying hard to find the right balance between being viewed as fleecing the tourists and second homers and providing affordable nutritious produce for our neighbors. Strawberries are indeed a special case where some realize you can’t buy such a delicacy in the store at any price and others who think you are ripping them off. I try my best not to grouse about how my unpaid labor subsidises even those “high priced” berries, but I dont always succeed.
Josh, same here. It’s sort of a which came first dilemma: did prices at farmers market go up when tourists came in with more dollars than locals, or did locals stop coming to farmers market to avoid tourists and “high” prices? One thing that has changed dramatically here in Canada in just the last year or so is the quality of fresh produce in grocery stores has been absolutely terrible – and it’s driving some people to check back in with local farmers. Berries are the top of the list for this phenomenon. The amount of people who have stated finding mould on berries is astounding. A new famous story that berry giant Driscoll’s has been fraudulently stamping “Organic” and have been exceeding pesticide levels … but of course these things are only caught after millions of punnets have sold.
I think between the quality and the higher pricing from diesel inflation, it may drive more folks to the markets. Keep the faith, brother!
“I think between the quality and the higher pricing from diesel inflation, it may drive more folks to the markets.”
This is what I am thinking (hoping?) as well. It wouldn’t take much of an increase in the stores to make local produce look like a good deal. And we know it tastes better.
Best of luck!
Shelling/shucking beans is therapy. I have depended on it for over twenty years. I used to try to get it done by Christmas, then by Thanksgiving. Now it is done by Halloween. I used to do it while watching movies. Now I sit in my easy chair and listen to music or podcasts. I do between 20-50 pounds of finished beans every year, although I am trying to reduce it down. Think of it as therapy.
Efficiency tips: beans in a large, low bowl on your lap. Pail on right side on the floor. Reverse if you are left-handed. Shuck beans in the bowl and take out the trash. At the end you will have a bowl o’beans. Winnow in the wind. Store in glass jars with good, tight lids. Weevils are small and determined. Keep unshucked beans in recycled produce flats until shucking. This makes it easy to stack them up and put on the window sill in the sun for further drying. I leave my beans in the field until shells are crispy. If you have some green ones, set aside. They will dry out.
Re: beans shucking as therapy – I agree! I bring a bushel of dried podded beans and shell them during slow periods at the market. It’ gets a lot of conversations going – some older folks hear the cracking sound of the pods breaking and you can see their memory bank click and they tell me how that was their jobs as kids. I often comment that it would be an excellent activity for kids that need the “fidget spinners” to cure their restlessness hands 🙂
THanks for the tips!
Two big reasons for the sky high rents in the U.K are….
1. Thatcher’s right to buy scheme where council housing was sold off to tenants for knock down prices. (One of my neighbours bought her house for £7,000!!!) Councils were also banned from using the money from the sales to build more council houses.
In 1979 one third of all housing in the UK were council houses. Secured, affordable tenancies have since become few and far between. The private sector filling the gap/need with “buy to rent” mortgages and those sold off council houses becoming private rental properties.
2. The deregulation of the banks in the late 90’s, means that there are very little constraints on how much money banks can lend (create out of thin air).
This has created huge inflation in the housing market. ( For home owners, this means increases in the value of their homes, which means that they can borrow against the property/mortgage)
Gone are the days when a mortgage was 3.5 x someone’s income.
Banks have found ways of getting round any restrictions on the amount they can lend out. Mortgage Backed Securities being one of the techniques.
I think these two changes. More than anything else, have created the crazy rental sector we see today. And the inflated house prices.
Out of interest and regarding land redistribution……
If the available farming land in the UK, arable and grazing, (probably a difficult figure to quantify in the first place) were distributed evenly to each adult, how many acres would we all get?
From DEFRA figures, there were 16.8 million hectares of agricultural land in the UK in 2025 (down a bit from previous years, but the figure normally hovers around 70% of total UK land area – hence, in a collapse scenario there’d potentially be more land to use, but existing farmland is the lion’s share).
That 16.8 million breaks down into 1.2 million of common rough grazing, which can probably be discounted as decent growing land, and then 6.1 million of cropland and 9.5 million of permanent pasture. The permanent pasture is difficult to characterise as some of it will be pretty rough land only suitable for grazing, while some of it would be fine for cropping. Anyway, if we take the cropland plus the permanent pasture and divide it up by the current UK population, which apparently is 70,059,073 (I’m glad that 73rd person declared themselves…) that gives 0.22 hectares (or 0.55 acres) per person. Hence a family of four would get about 2 acres – which should be plenty, although they may have to go easy on the livestock, maybe sharing it (did somebody say ‘commons’…?)
Based on my own data, one acre is plenty for 4 adults. This is based on rotation, fallowing and NO livestock. Some crops provide surplus for trade.
So, it’s viable, even if unlikely.
The land is just the beginning. What about the house (and the stuff in it, like a woodstove), the barn, the fencing, the woodlot, the wagon, the tools, the water source and collection equipment, etc. Then there are the skills needed to make a living on the land.
All of these things need to be in place before collapse. An urbanite walking out of a disfunctional city to a parcel of bare ag land is a dead man walking.
Yes, quite so – a problem that gets graver each extra day we dawdle. The fact that most of our prominent anti-capitalist voices are so laser-focused on making the cost of urban living cheaper, not least by keeping food prices down, compounds the problem.
Really great article with some vintage Smaje dry humour that is reserved for Marxists, and had me chuckling.
Verso has been having a hard time recently with Gabriel Rockhill’s exhaustively researched demolition of the CIA funded ‘cultural theory’ Marxist lite left. I’ve not read it but he’s calling to a return to action and iteration over navel gazing and it’s gratifying to know what you thought was waffle, is actually waffle.
I’ve been reading Bookchin’s 60’s energy infused ‘Post Scarcity Anarchism’ which is alot of fun, haven’t finished yet. No less than Cory Doctorow put the boot into Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (of which Bookchin may have unwittingly inspired?). There is a great clip on Absurd Intelligence, an article called ‘why is everything so unreal?’ which shows him saying ‘maybe in 500 years’.
As other commenters have said, this thinking is a microcosm of the present thinking on the left which is materialist and material blind, making it incomprehensible – and bit mad.
I love the numbers on land, this is where it’s at for me – have you heard this Micheal Taite guy, did a masters on planning for villages? He’s doing the rounds on substack and Manda Scott. Wondered what you made of that. I know it’s ‘best laid plans…’ but it is fun to sort of see where this can go, where the commons can emerge. We’re still marching on with Care Home Farm, 2 more years until the middle child finishes A levels – we’ll be turning up on your doorstep! 😉
I read these discussions with deep interest as we are living this reality today. We can’t afford to pay for help ($35-50/hr for basic landcape maintenance here) as we can’t compete with other employers with deep pockets. This summer we had one intern for two days a week at $50/day stipend. These interns are organized through the local land trust who is their actual employer, freeing us from the state employer bureaurcracy and costs that would make it untenable. We also had another work/housing trade where we allowed a women to keep here RV on our property for 12hrs/week of labor while she worked seasonally at a local restaurant. The arrangement seemed to work well for all sides but I am very conscious of the power imbalance that exists and the potential for abuse. I have no wish to be a landlord but I do need help. We plan to continue to explore more work trade in the future and are glad to live in a community that has some precident and foresight in such complexities.
A lot to agree with here. I do consider financialization as a major issue here. And in turn I see this as a situation where there is no profit to be made in agriculture, industries and most services which leads to low interest, i.e. cheap capital. Not even AI seems to suck enough capital to change this.
I see neo-liberalism as a project to rejuvenate capitalism by broad privatisation, de-regulation and globalisation. It did address real failures of welfare capitalism aka social democracy/labour party, but its recipe didn’t work so well, once the initial flood of capital and new business had run out of steam and there is no more periphery to exploit.
Both the nostaligic left and the neoliberals are looking back, towards a golden era when all stars were aligned. Rapid economic expansion (it is always easier to just expand, look at China the last twenty five years), a very favorable demographic (demography is the most neglected of the important factors of change), exploitation of the periphery, ample natural resources including fossil energy). Now, the situation is very different, with increasing resource scarcity, a demographic drag instead of dividend, massive needs to just keep existing infrastructure operating and a parallel need to transform key infrastructures, especially energy.
I tend to see trumpism in this light. It is not neoliberalism as the state is very active and take stakes in companies and the state is also run more like a company – it is not only a question of bad language when Trump speaks about deals instead of treaties or agreements. It targets complexity by slashing all sorts of regulations, many of which were a direct result of the neo-liberal agenda, which, despite its anti state creed, increased regulations in many areas. It is also very hostile to business led ESG programs as these are seen as unecessary and burdensome. It has also abandoned the always false notion that everybody gains from free trade and replaced that with some kind of brutal “mercantilism”.
I think the rapid post war economic expansion (1945-1965) was due to the global economy switching from coal to oil.
Oil is everything.
The easy to get to oil has all been had.
It’s increasingly energy intensive to extract the remaining oil. Old wells as well as drilling new ones.
This is leading to the unraveling of the global economy, closely followed by societies.
We can see the scramble for the last few drops playing out globally as we speak
On a tangent….
I’ve been going down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole on how to produce fabric from hemp and flax :).
Want to give it a go. Like the idea of making a pair of jeans out of hemp.
It’s a long multi-process process!!!! Not conducive to “fast fashion” 🙂
People must have really value their clothes and kept them for as long as possible, back in the day.
Anyone know how many square meters of hemp I would need to grow, to get enough yarn for a pair of jeans?
There are 2 sessions of ‘Grow Your Own clothes’ at the Remakery left and it’s running again next year. It’ll take you through the full process. Its coordinated by my wife Alice and Alan Brown (The Nettle Dress). Hemp Harvest Festival has been going a few years now, and Contemporary Hempery are based at Wakelins in Suffolk. And there’s Flaxland near Stroud, legends. Alice has also been running Rooted Colour, which is an exploration of natural dye plant growing within a commons network of community gardens. Let me know if you need some links.
@Joel
Sorry. Only just spotted your post. Thanks for that.
Think my daughter and I are going to book on a course. She spotted one in Stroud. Might be the one you mentioned.
I will check out the other one too.
@Joel.
And, yes please to any links.
@Joel.
Would Alice be up for me asking a few questions regarding hemp processing? I’ve seen a fibre stripping tool on some YouTube videos. Its not a technique I’ve seen used over here. Was wondering if she had come across it and if so, the pros and cons?
Thanks for the further comments. I’m short on time to respond, but it’s great to hear about hemp, flax, beans, Marxism and neoliberalism. Let me know how your farming project goes Joel – you’re welcome to visit of course – and also your fibre project, John. Regarding financialisation, yes various of Thatcher’s policies and the postwar rise of oil no doubt help explain high rents, but I don’t really see this outcome as avoidable in a world of perpetual economic growth. Land divided by an annual return on investment doesn’t go. Having wars often helps too of course, although not for the slain.
Not sure how far I’m going to get with the hemp jeans project in reality!?
Might not get past the theoretical stage 🙂
This guy seems to know what he is doing though.
https://youtu.be/3JKhhtoe9v4?si=YjZygL9ePhg-glca
John, I heard that the Oxford Real Farming Conference in January will have a talk covering hemp growing, I believe in the ‘scaling novel crops in the face of climate change’ session.
#Simon H.
Thanks for the tip off. I’ll check it out.
Just booked myself onto a Charles Dowding no-dig workshop for later this month.
Have also just come across Ruth Stout. Probably well known to people here but new to me.
Anyone tried out her technique?
I tried it with spuds, continental climate, setting them out mid-March hoping for some early potatoes. I concluded I’d probably have reaped a better harvest planting directly into the good soil. I seem to remember Dowding tried the same thing with potatoes, but I heard he now uses the same potato plot every year.
I also tried Emilia Hazelip’s ‘synergistic gardening’ approach, another no-dig cultivation method, and some of the recommendations seemed to work well enough, so I stuck with them, such as planting and mulching garlic around the edges of the bed. It’s fun to try out different ideas to see what works on your plot.
Re: Ruth Stout, yes, I tried it with mixed results. Yes, it it did suppress weeds, however it also created a wonderful habitat for all the vermin. Whatever vermin there are in your area it will attract and eat the tubers of anything growing. For us, it was voles. If that isn’t an issue, there is a real dependence on continuing to lay the hay down, if you don’t the seeds in the hay will sprout. Ruth did point this out, but I was pretty shocked at how quickly hay can compost down.
#Simon H.
Just checked out the website.
Can see any specific times for specific talks. I guess the schedule will come out later. Might see if I can follow it online rather than in person.
Though a trip to Oxford might be nice. I fancy popping into the Pitt-Rivers and looking at some Aboriginal ground stone tools.
#Chris
Your point in the article is very true.
Anyone with a private pension might not want to look too deeply in where the pension fund is invested.
Or any investments for that matter.
“He who casts the first stone” and all that……… (Not sure that is the correct term/reference)
We are all meshed into the extractive/explorative nature of global capitalism, whether we like it or not. 🙁
A pyramid of exploitation.
I just fell on the right side of private house ownership. For my kids, it’s going to be a different story.
Unfortunately they won’t be able to own their own home and have the great pleasure of spending time with their parents at the same time. It’s either or. 🙂
some of Those with private pensions have been bitten twice by the tax man . most do not know this but when private / company pensions were started by Maggie there were two types , pay tax on contributions and reciepts would be tax free , or dont pay tax and pay tax when the pension was received ,, many took the first option and a few years later tax was imposed on them ,so ….. contributions Taxed at basic rate , then pension payments taxed AGAIN at basic rate giving a collective tax rate of near 50 % .
In reply to Mike Barnes, I had a big bale of hay from last year to use as mulch this summer. It worked really well for my Borlotti beans (Gramma Walters) but was not so good for squash and potatoes. Some creatures (probably voles) ate the roots of squashes and ate big lumps out of my potatoes. Next year I might try growing the squashes so the leaves shade the soil between the climbing beans.
Try growing squashes on either side of your corn block. The vines will run into the corn. Just pay attention when you are picking your sweet corn so you don’t step on young squashes. In my experience, C. maxima “run to the corn” more than C. moschata. Also, my butternuts (moschata) did better in the drought and heat waves this year (5 heat waves in France!) than my buttercups (maxima). They were planted together on the south side of my popcorn block.
Yes, this was my experience with hay as well, the cover is perfect for the critters to wreak havoc. I am quite serious about my winter squash, I’ve been doing some seed saving and landrace making for the moschata strains (butternuts mostly). Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that landscape fabrics are the only solution to producing abundant squash. I’m not a fan of plastics, but I have some invasive weeds that will absolutely take over if I don’t use it. I’ve been purchasing the thicker plastic (5oz.) rather than the cheaper 2-3 oz versions, and, more importantly, I don’t cut them … once that weave starts to unravel it’s a disaster. So I lay down two tarps side by side and leave a 12″ gap and put down thick aged manure for planting, and that way I only have that gap that I have to weed if at all. For my bush beans and corn, I cultivate the rows now regularly using a two wheel push hoe, which I find is more lower back friendly than pull hoes, and you can leverage more power from legs and buttocks.
@Mike Barnes
I spent yesterday on a no-dig course at Charles Dowding’s place. Really enjoyed it.
He seems to be getting something right judging by the quantity of squashed/pumpkins around the place.
Hi Walter,
I might try growing corn (maize) next year with the squash and beans in 3 sisters fashion. I had trouble with something eating my sweet corn in previous years, possibly squirrels. I’m interested in seed for growing corn for corn flour. Any suggestions welcome. I’m in Herefordshire.
Frank – It depends what you want. When you say corn flour, I assume you want a masa corn for tortillas. Since you are in England, you will have to investigate varieties available there. A quick check online indicates you can get Blue Hopi and Black Tortilla. My incentives are different since I eat mostly sweet corn and popcorn. Your problem with sweet corn may be rats rather than squirrels. Last year in southern France we had a boom year in rats. They got all my popcorn and most of my sweet corn. I killed seven through various means. The usual number in my garden is 1-2 per year. Rats are an r-selected species and have a rapid boom/bust cycle. This year is not bad at all. and I only killed one through poison. All my neighbors had the same experience. We have natural predators – cats, hawks, and foxes – but I also use poison, stab them with a pitchfork in my compost heaps, and drown them by running a hose down their holes and turning on the water. If you are going to make tortillas, you will have to investigate the nixtamalization process. There are lots of YouTube videos on this. For corn bread or polenta, you don’t have to worry about lack of niacin because these dishes are not your sole dietary staple. Making flat corn tortillas without nixtamalization may be a taste difference too. I don’t have much experience with this. We eat purchased corn tortillas all the time with our beans. I wish we could get all-corn tortillas here in rural France, but we cannot. The corn/wheat tortillas are good enough, though.
Here is my program from about 15 years ago. I took 2 varieties of sweet corn and 2 varieties of flint corn, mixed them up and double-planted them with my seeder. Then I let them go to seed. I sorted for color and did a taste test for corn bread on the blue seed – smooth vs wrinkled. (I assume you know all about the continuum of wrinkled pericarps.) There was little difference in the taste and so I dropped the flint corn seedlines. I have been doing various experiments over the years on this base, selecting by color. As I have mentioned before, I look for transposons, which are noticeable on the phenotype as blue or red stripes or blotches on the kernels.
A word on mechanics. When you are sorting seed, it is more efficient to use a table knife to take off single seeds and then sort onto different plates by color and texture. Shucking the whole ear and then picking different colors and textures out of a pile with your fingers is much slower. I still get the occasional flint corn kernel, which I separate out and grow separately to keep the seed line going.
The whole discussion of flour (masa) corn vs flint corn vs dent corn vs sweet corn is as wide and deep as the Thames. You will have to figure out what you want. I have also had success in turning popular hybrid sweet corn into open-pollinated varieties. It is pretty simple. Just grow the F1 out for seed and then plant it. Over the years, as you keep selecting and planting, it will regress to the mean. Purists may say my landrace Bodacious, for example, is not quite the same as the Bodacious SE hybrid available from the seed companies, but it sure tastes good to me and my partner. I can say the same with Golden Jubilee SU and Kandy Korn SE strains that are now open-pollinated. My Bodacious, which is usually a bit fickle weatherwise in the commercial strain, did very well in the heat and drought conditions this year.
The ultimate test is based on taste. In sweet corn, for instance, there is a continuum of taste based on “corniness” and sweetness. The open-pollinated heritage varieties pre-1930s (when hybrid corn really got going) have a decidedly different taste than the first SU hybrids. Then further along the continuum are the SE and Xtra Sweet (SH2) varieties. Many of the “old folks” still prefer the SU hybrids because they have a more “corny” taste. I cannot stand the Xtra Sweet varieties myself. Back in Minnesota, where I grew up, stealing whole truckloads of sweet corn to sell on the side of the road was a real problem. Some people grew their special hybrid in the middle of their field to prevent this problem. One fellow I talked to once was very proud of how he had figured this out and STILL stole a bunch of corn from that particular farmer. He was a townie though.
@Frank.
The 3 sisters are a good bet. Each crop stores well.
How easy is it to grow corn in the UK?
You should find less pest pressure when growing non-sweet corn varieties. I grew popcorn this year, and I had less pressure from large animals like raccoons and possums, but I believe I did get some birds (crows?) towards the end when they were almost completely dry. I am trying a flour corn next year called Cascade Ruby Gold Flint Corn, which was bred by Carol Deppe in the USA, great quick season flour corn. Both my farmer neighbors grew corn this year, and next year they will do soybean, so it’s my window to grow corn and save seed 🙂
Nice article Chris,
J.M. Keynes talked about the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, meaning that he believed the Central Bank should set the interest rate at 0%, and keep it there. This would slowly eliminate rentiers who earn an income with rent while taking no risk. Granted it might not eliminate landlords, as they arguably take some risk (the value may go down, they need to maintain the property etc), but the level of rents has to be seen in comparison to what people with money (or their asset managers) would get from their money if they kept it in a gilts savings account. Currently the interest on short term gilts is 3,75%, not too long ago it was 5%. This means that for a developer to be incentivized to build housing or a farm, the project would have to return more than that, say 3% on top of the central bank rate, or 6,75%. I was recently at a meeting here in Finland about money, and someone mentioned that the commercial forest has a growth rate of 4%, so you can see how even forest owners will have a hard time competing for capital with these high interest rates. Why take a risk if you are not sure to get any return?
I think this is an interesting topic as many other countries are also currently trying to find these answers. Perhaps you can add to your reading list Brett Christophers, book ‘Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World’, and use it as input for a future post.
@Chris H.
But pension funds love a government bond. They are the safest investment in town.
Reduce the yield to 0% and pensions go pop, closely followed by the rest of the economy.
Everything relies on endless growth.
But as we all now, infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.
There are some big readjustments coming down the line.
Thank you for your comments John.
Yes pension funds hold a lot of government bonds. But they do not necessarily ‘pop’ if the interest goes to 0%. We had near 0% interest rate in Europe from 2014 to 2022. Japan had it for about 30 years.
If we had a decent state pension, there would be much less need for money managers chasing the world for ‘better than average’ yielding assets. The Government simply creates the money and pays it to the pensioner.
If anything the pension funds are contributing to the instability in financial markets because they are always looking for higher yielding assets and taking on more risk as time goes on. Their role in the Global Financial Crisis was significant as they were buying the fraudulent derivatives without fully knowing the risks.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/the-trouble-with-pensions-2010-04-07/
‘Everything relies on endless growth.’
I would specifically mention capitalism, as people with money only invest it to get more money. So it would be great if we start coming up with ideas that are compatible with post-capitalism. One example is the job guarantee. Unemployment is a feature only observed in monetary economies. There was no unemployment in tribal societies, in feudalism or in slave societies. Market forces do not lead to full employment. The government is the only agent that has the resources to provide a job to anyone willing and able to work. If your government is not willing to implement it, you can start a smaller government (with its own currency) to go ahead like some people in Scotland are planning to do for example.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/WP-1131-Keynes_Marx_Minsky_Synthesis.pdf
Indeed this would set in motion quite large readjustments, but I would rather develop some ideas that are ‘lying around’ rather than having neo-classical economists come up with them. Usually whenever there is a financial crisis, the 1% benefit disproportionally in the recovery that follows. E.g. in the great depression in the U.S., many farmers had no other option than selling their land.
Reviewing Nick Bano’s book while asking whether the target should be landlords or the conditions that create landlordism is a useful distinction. I would be interested in your review of the Vaclav Smil book from your reading list as well.
Hi Walter (and John).
Thanks for the detailed info on growing corn, and suggestions for varieties. I haven’t tried growing it much so far. I’ll now try growing enough (more than 20 plants) so that I can save seed without inbreeding depression. The reason for trying flour corn rather than sweet corn was that I understood that sweet corn has less food value. It seems from what you say that there is a spectrum between the types.
As far as 3 sisters goes, when I tried previously my sweet corn needed to be bigger and stronger to support the climbing beans at the start. Plenty of maize is grown for forage or to feed an anaerobic digester locally to me, so there shouldn’t be problems growing it in Herefordshire. I realise after our hot summer how useful it could be for the squash leaves to shade the soil.
Since you are only doing a small patch, I suggest Southwest style. 3-4 plants in a clump about 1-2 meters apart. I still plant 4 rows to a block but have had good luck this year with only 3 rows in one block. SW style will provide more stability for your climbing beans too.
I googled inbreeding depression and in my opinion, the topic is mostly lies based on high capital inputs and a well-funded chemical/land grant college cabal. Landrace paradigms are quite different.
The three sisters idea originated with the SW style.
Thanks Walter. I’m learning a lot here. I had to look up SW style.
Thanks to Mike Barnes for his tips. I have had seeds from Carol Deppe in the past including Oregon Homestead squash.
Regarding fibre: this year I made a rosary for a dear friend. Rose petals for some of the beads, carved elder for the others, walnut ink I made myself for the writing on the medallion (which was another slice of elder), and… well, I had intended to use nettle for the string to hold it all together, but it didn’t work out that way. The drought meant the distance between the needle leaf nodes was just too short for me to spin it well.
So I went and harvested some New Zealand Flax (Phormium tenax) from the park instead and it made really wonderful string, better than I’ve ever made with nettle. No retting required, but the fibre does need to be stripped before the leaves dry, so harvesting a little at a time is best.