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Posted on February 23, 2014 | 17 Comments
I ought to be in overdrive right now getting ready for the new growing season, but the monstrous floods we’ve had here in Somerset have interrupted all my best laid plans. So apart from occasional acts of frantic ditch-digging, instead I’ve had a chance to catch up on my reading. And those doom-mongering greentards say climate change is a bad thing!
Anyway, one of the books I’ve read is Geert Mak’s An Island In Time: The Biography of a Village, which charts the history – social and agricultural – of a small farming village called Jorwert in the Netherlands. It’s a great book in numerous respects, not the least of them being Mak’s ability to avoid romanticising the agricultural life of the past while maintaining a nuanced scepticism about the agricultural developments of modern times. You wouldn’t think this was such a hard stunt to pull off, but it’s remarkably rare in contemporary writings about farming. Marty Strange’s book Family Farming is the best other example I know (plus Jan van der Ploeg’s work, of which more anon). The nice thing about Mak’s book, though, is that it’s less academic in tone – it’s long-form, eyewitness reportage, breathing life into the issues by telling us about actual people.
Mak addresses a couple of themes which are close to the concerns of this blog. Here I’m going to address the implications of one of them, namely changes in dairying, the dominant form of farming in Jorwert in modern times (it’s worth bearing in mind that, though small and relatively isolated, farming in the village has long been of a commercial kind, oriented to selling milk, butter and cheese to city folk in a highly urbanised society).
The story in essence is that circa 1945 a farm with 20-30 milk cows, hand-milked by around 3-4 workers would have been an average-sized commercial concern in Jorwert. That changed with the arrival of milking machines, bulk tanks and, later, milking robots. By the 1960s, a single farmer would often manage over 100 cows alone on the holding. In 1975, the last farm labourer in Jorwert lost his job. In the 1990s, herd sizes were larger still, but by then few Jorwert dairy farmers were still in business.
Now, you can argue that milking machines and suchlike make the job easier – doubtless there are few who would wish to return to the days of hand-milking – but they don’t just make the job easier, they also fundamentally change ‘the job’. From the perspective of the individual farmer, the milking machine is not a labour-saving device. It doesn’t mean you have to work less hard; it means that you now have to manage a bigger herd, in a different kind of way. And from the perspective of the farming community or of wider society, it means the loss of jobs and the loss of farms, in this case aided and abetted by government policy and the financialisation of farming that made capital rather than land or labour the new resource limit. A nice thing about Mak’s analysis here is that he sees through the rhetoric of efficiency or economies of scale that seeks to present agricultural modernisation as unambiguously positive. The large dairying businesses that survived in Jorwert became, in his words, “trapped in…a continual spiral of more investment, more production, more subsidies, more profit, and more investment again – because otherwise it all went to the taxman. The sheds filled up with tractors, combine harvesters, beet-lifters, water-spraying systems, pickup trucks, crop-sprayers, top-dressers, reapers, low-loaders, hydraulic shakers, silage wagons, feeders, cultivators, coulters, maize-cutters, crushers and whatever else had been thought up in the way of machinery”1.
A parallel development was the rise of confined pig operations in the area, in which thousands of pigs were raised on just a few acres using bought-in concentrate feeds. One of the many bad consequences of this was a vast excess of fertility unknown from the days of grass-fed dairying, which led to all sorts of sharp practices and pollution problems – an ongoing issue today in concentrate-dependent modern agriculture.
There’s much I learned from Mak’s analysis, but here I’ll confine myself to three brief points. The first, as I’ve already said, is that new technology doesn’t just make the job easier, it changes the job, and indeed very often destroys the job. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if there are new and better jobs available for the now redundant farm workers. Often, though, that isn’t the case – as the great Dick Gaughan reminds us, concern over the fate of labour has never been a conspicuous concern in the entrepreneurial drive to lower input costs (well, he puts it a bit more lyrically than that, but still…). And, as I’ve argued elsewhere in the light of Tim Jackson’s interesting work2, there is now a strong imperative in the context of climate change to move towards low carbon and labour-intensive economic activity. How would the different dairying systems in Jorwert past and present stack up against that metric?
Second, Mak’s analysis of the financialisation and mechanisation of dairy farming suggests to me that there’s probably a point at which the society-wide marginal benefits of these developments are exceeded by the society-wide marginal costs, and that farming in countries like the Netherlands (and Britain) has long been riding this downslope. My point, if it needs reiterating, is not that technological development is always a bad thing – it can be a good thing. But you can have too much of a good thing, particularly when it starts to undermine the social values that matter to people. A nice thing about Mak’s book is that he’s not too starry-eyed about the social values of his traditional farming community and the various suppressed conflicts embedded in them, but he doesn’t forget that ultimately it’s social values and not efficiency or returns to investment that matter most. How refreshing it would be to have a proper political discussion about appropriate farming scale, rather than the relentless peddling of the ‘get big or get out’ ideology. It’s not clear that increasingly large-scale modern dairying really does produce cheaper milk, but even if it does it’s not clear that the benefits of this outweigh the many social costs to actual people and communities. Somebody, somewhere can almost certainly produce what you do more cheaply. So what? Produce it anyway (scope here perhaps for a future post on the misleading way in which Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage is often invoked to critique the apparent inefficiency of old industries).
But, finally, perhaps herein lies hope for a smaller farm future. That, at any rate, is the position taken by another Dutch writer, Jan van der Ploeg3, who argues essentially that the ‘get big or get out’ trajectory of mainstream farming is starting to ingest itself as the marginal return downslope increasingly changes the narrative to ‘get big, and then still get out’ – the experience of many Jorwert dairy farmers. His research (also based in Friesland, where Jorwert is located) suggests that farmers adopting smaller-scale, biotic-cycling, community-oriented dairy farming can achieve better financial returns than those following the upscaling conventional dynamic. This, among other factors, is why he considers there to be a dynamic of ‘repeasantisation’ occurring alongside the dynamic of industrialisation in Europe. So, despite the connivance of government policy and skewed markets pushing the ‘get big or get out’ model, it may be that the input-output balance of farmers like me with my little old tractor, my vintage farm implements culled from ebay, and my band of merry local volunteers will be able to gain market leverage. ‘Use small and slow solutions’ as permaculturist David Holmgren says, ‘The bigger they are the harder they fall; slow and steady wins the race’4. Marty Strange has argued much the same in the case of American family farming. Well, at least it gives me some hope that I’m not barking completely up the wrong tree. Now all I need is to be able to get out onto my sodden fields and start doing some bloody farming…
References
1. Mak, G. (2010) An Island In Time, Vintage, p.79.
2. Jackson, T. (2009) Prosperity Without Growth, Earthscan.
3. van der Ploeg, J. (2008) The New Peasantries, Earthscan.
4. Holmgren, D. (2002) Permaculture, Holmgren Design Services.
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Chris:
This didn’t occur to me when I first looked at this post – but from far off here on the other side of the Atlantic I may have actually played a small part in pressuring some of the Dutch dairies. And before I get pilloried for my part I want to make it clear there was no intent.
So how does a soybean breeder impact the livelihood of a Dutch dairyman? Why – through soymilk of course. And on the one hand I can make the case that all the soymilk folk involved in this story can take some satisfaction in their contribution to sustainability on a global scale – even if that contribution should have the effect of slightly softening a cow’s milk market in Western Europe.
As it happens there is a giant soybean cow (the engineer’s own word’s for it) in Belgium. It was once owned and operated by Alpro, and is now the property of White Wave I believe. Anyway, this factory uses raw soybean grain, water, with a few other ingredients and makes soymilk. And quite a bit at that.
Now soymilk is a wonderful food. It contains no cholesterol, is vegan friendly of course, and is very nutritious. Cow’s milk is also a great food, but the cows generate more greenhouse gas per gallon of milk than the soybean does. To be very transparent here, however, I’ve not done the calculation to account for fuel to ship soy from N. America to Belgium and bill it on the soy side, but I also haven’t billed the cow for her feed cost either.
There is a traditional dairyman here in Ohio who actually grows food grade soy (non-GMO) of the sort that could be used in the Belgian plant. He once asked me if any of the soy he’s growing could be used to make soymilk (most of what has been grown in this particular market is used to make tofu in the Pacific Rim). When I indicated that it could – though probably wouldn’t be – he wrinkled his forehead and wondered out loud if he were competing with himself. In a global sense he is. But in terms of comparative advantage, he’s in a situation where feeding and milking cows while growing food grade soy that may end up in a glass as soymilk still makes economic sense. There are rotational advantages to raising soy, and on some of his acres forage production for cows is appropriate.
Our modern food system is pretty complex indeed, and sometimes there are factors at work that may elude even those of us involved smack in the middle of it.
Interesting points – how big is the soymilk sector compared to dairy? I assumed that the decline of Friesian dairying was connected to the increased mechanisation and to cheaper imports of cow’s milk, but maybe soymilk is also a factor. Obviously, the other soy issue is as an input into dairying: one of van der Ploeg’s points is that farmers who focus on the cow-manure-grass cycle rather than buying in soya-based concentrates can now end up better off, even if their cows are less productive animal for animal.
I don’t have actual numbers, but I think you are safe to imagine that increased mechanization, access to capital, and imports are still more significant than competition from soymilk. Another asset on the soy side of the balance sheet that I failed to mention earlier is no lactose in soymilk so lactose intolerance is not an issue. This would seem to be less an advantage in Europe where the frequency of lactose intolerance is much less.
Did van der Ploeg’s analysis include the price of land? Income per unit land area can make a difference – but one that isn’t always obvious from the outside. A farmer who owns her own land has the freedom to take as income from it a portion she is comfortable with. However, if someone is purchasing land and borrows capital to do so then the lender will likely have quite an influence on what levels of income are acceptable.
Thanks for this interesting analysis, as a potential ‘new peasant’ myself I will look out the van der Ploeg book too. I am just reading Taleb’s ‘Antifragility’, which offers a useful perspective on the kind of economic thinking based on increased efficiency and indebtedness at the expense of resilience to unforeseen events (which in Taleb’s view characterise all of economic and social life) Although he doesn’t address agriculture apart from a brief critique of Ricardo in the appendix (his heroes are mostly financial speculators) his logic applies to more productive occupations just as readily.
I’d like to thank Craig for the Taleb ref. as well. It made me curious, and I see that Taleb is also the Black Swan author. I’d forgotten this. He also has a collection of aphorisms under the title The Bed of Procrustes… and among the thoughts he shares in the latter:
“Wealthy” is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use intead (sic) the subtractive measure “unwealth,” that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have.
That thought seemed quite appropriate for our conversation.
Thanks Clem & Craig for the additional comments. I’m not sure if VDP’s analysis included the price of land…I assume so, as the study involved various control groups and looks like it was done quite scrupulously, so you’d think a key variable of this sort was controlled for. A quick skim through the text of his book doesn’t provide a definitive answer – guess I could check back in the original paper…if only I could read Dutch (my ancestors will be turning in their graves!)
Taleb: another book for my reading list from you Craig! I’d be interested in reading his critique of Ricardo, because it strikes me that there’s much to be said for Ricardo’s analysis of farm economics (though the theory of comparative advantage has done a lot of damage, I think). Funny how both market economics and natural selection invariably favour present expedience over long-term resilience: Mak says that nature was one big lottery, so peasant farm families played it safe and acted with great prudence for generation after generation. Contemporary agriculture seems to have shed a lot of this prudence, since it no longer appears to need it, just as dodos shed their wings, having no need to escape from any predators.
On natural selection invariably favoring present experience over long term resilience… I think that might need further consideration. I’m not immediately convinced the assertion holds more often than not.
I will certainly agree that on many occasions a new phenotype will ultimately prove less fit and thereby be eliminated through the force of selection. But there are very obvious examples of resilient features built into extant organisms serving the function of long term resilience. Sex comes to mind. And among the plants of this planet the role of polyploidy fills this role quite well. Granted, these are major aspects of some living beings and not ones of frequent ‘new’ occurrence. But they are still maintained and at cost – so one imagines there must be value to them else their cost would render them less fit and they would be eliminated.
Whether modern human selection forces in the realm of plant breeding are engaged in a similar search for resilience is another matter. But I’m not persuaded here that it is wholly necessary in all situations. If an immediate goal is to provide for current needs then breeding results might be forgiven if they accomplish immediate goals at the expense of resilience. This goes back to the notion of buying time in the present situation so that one might have the opportunity to live and fight another day.
So while this latter may not be an ideal situation, it seems preferable to failure. Now to come back to the position I think we both prefer – to champion long term capabilities. I will certainly agree this has to be a priority. But perhaps not the only priority.
Oops – I used experience vs expedience… not sure it matters to the argument, but it appears in my hurry I’ve experienced a failure to be expedient. 🙁
Fair points. Perhaps ‘resilience’ isn’t quite the right word, inasmuch as you’re clearly right that there are all sorts of evolutionary adaptations geared to long-term survival rather than short-term gain, which impose short-term costs. And probably likewise in the economic behaviour of most firms. I suppose what I meant is that natural selection doesn’t address contingency or perturbation to the usual range of selective pressures acting on the organism – as when the dodos encountered Homo sapiens. And the same goes for the way that economies tend to be optimised around a narrow range of parameters – so perhaps rather than ‘resilience’ it’s more what I believe ecologists call ‘dynamic robustness’. Perhaps the question is how much is it possible or desirable for an economy to organise for dynamic robustness in a way that natural selection can’t – climate change being an obvious current example. Or maybe the whole natural selection/economy comparison is just dud.
Your point about polyploidy is interesting – I’ve read up a little on this, but haven’t really got my head around it. As I understand it, polyploidy is more common in cultivated plants and tends to confer various advantages to the organism itself and various disadvantages to its reproductive chances. I’d be interested in hearing your further thoughts on it, especially as it touches on my interest in annual vs perennial crops. I agree that it’s not necessary to prioritise resilience in every crop – but maybe prioritising it in every farm, or at least in every society/civilisation isn’t a bad idea?
I wouldn’t toss the whole selection/economic survival comparison overboard. I have issues with some aspects, but the broader strokes seem to make sense.
I actually do think some organisms possess sufficient phenotypic plasticity to accommodate fairly significant upheaval. The dodo is obviously an example of a critter that didn’t. And while Homo sapiens seem to have a far more expansive ecological range, how would we fair under a nuclear winter? There have been some extremely significant extinction events over geological time and yet here today we have a planet full of life. Over economic time there have been quite a number of corporations, partnerships, and so forth. Most are gone, but there are still many. Competition in the marketplace makes winners and losers. Where we can learn from other’s mistakes then these memes take on a life of their own. By learning and transferring knowledge amongst ourselves and our children we don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ – and we as a species are thus more robust. Warehousing grain to allow survival in the face of drought is a centuries old habit… one that has prevented us (thus far at least) from going the way of the dodo.
It seems to me there is far too much hand wringing over extinction/bankruptcy and other types of ‘failure’. When a toddler falls down while attempting to walk there’s likely someone who’s heart goes out to somehow prevent the difficulty. And I’m not trying to stifle that heartfelt notion, but let the tike keep trying. She won’t magically learn to walk… it comes with bumps and bruises. NOT learning to walk is far more debilitating. So if some business entity is not sufficiently robust in its current marketplace it will eventually fail. Its bankruptcy hurts those involved (creditors as well as employees and managers) – but its a price that has to be borne in a capitalist economy. Bankruptcy laws should allow some sort of assistance to affected parties, but ultimately some sort of loss has to be realized or the market overall won’t work.
Likewise, when species are not sufficiently robust for changes in the environment – especially catastrophic ones – then extinction exacts the price. Not good for those being tossed to the curb, but it does create space then for those remaining. From the earth’s perspective – we are just another species… if we can’t cut it we end up on the same heap with the dodos. And I’m thinking there won’t be any tears if (or when) that should happen.
Its like politics and making sausages. Hard to watch, but…
So as a market entity, are small farms more robust than larger ones? I’d suggest that comparison – based on size alone – is not adequate. A well-managed large farm can be fairly robust. Is monoculture better or worse than polyculture? Again, don’t like the simplicity of the question. Annuals vs perennials… same story. I love apples and green beans. The former is a perennial, the latter an annual. Why choose based on life history?
I do think your point about prioritizing resilience is VERY worthwhile – and for me this probably has to be done at a political level. Again though, politics and sausages…
I’ll come back to the polyploidy issue… it fascinates me too.
Thanks for more thoughtful comments, Clem. Glad of your assent that there’s some merit it the evolution/economy comparison, though I don’t totally agree with your analysis on the merits of failure for reasons I set out quite a while ago on this blog at https://chrissmaje.com/?p=112 – essentially to do with the way that large scale economic interests co-opt states to police their interests for them and prevent new niches and competition in a way that no organism in the natural world (other than perhaps Homo sapiens) has been able to. I also posted some complementary thoughts on economic scale at https://chrissmaje.com/?p=157.
Despite my ‘small farm future’ schtick, I do agree with you about the over-simplification of dichotomies such as large/small, mono/poly, perennial/annual, though I think these are surface manifestations of something deeper where there are genuinely different options open to us. On the issue of perennials and annuals, though, I think the significant point is precisely as you frame it – life history. Certainly we need both perennials and annuals, but I’m not so convinced that we can breed plants to give us the positive traits of both forms, without any of the negative ones.
Failure… I’ll have to allow it usually doesn’t connote the sort of outcome we would relish. But I want to argue that like lots of other concepts we deal with, context is very important.
One could argue that an Amaranth in your garden that you pick for greens is a failure. You pick the leaves and kill the poor thing. It has failed to reproduce and leave seed for the next generation. Now we don’t account this loss as much, but to that particular plant its a crisis.
If you mark your arithmetic test with a 6 when the question asked for the sum of 4 and 3 you will be marked incorrect. Enough of that behavior and you’ll fail. If you are 6 years old this particular failure shouldn’t have serious life consequences. Make the same mistake while designing a rocket ship and – well, you see my point.
A fair sized critter, say that roe buck that died at your farm, fails to notice an approaching car on the highway. Ooops.
Now that car gets dinged (or worse) and the buck is killed. Happens all the time. Now the driver of the car will likely have a different impression of the event then another motorist who happens on the scene later and observes the dead buck lying by the road. Further – the impression of a buzzard that finds the carcass (dinner!!). Context.
Before I leave the impression that an Organic Farmer’s bankruptcy is no big deal – I have a bit more heart than that I hope – I try to find a silver lining. One could hope the farm that is left behind is in better condition for having been farmed organically. One could hope that other small farmers will look on the situation and see if there are lessons to draw from it. One has to hope. Despair is hard on the heart.
So – polyploidy…
A fairly complex issue, so I’ll be glossing A LOT. Also know that I’m not one of mankind’s leading authorities on the matter, so please ask questions and challenge any comment that doesn’t either make sense or seems outrageous – I could be mistaken.
So, what is polyploidy in the first place? Multiple ploidy levels. It can arise from simple genome duplication within a single species – essentially creating a new species all at once (saltational evolution); it can arise from a pollination between related species – wheat is perhaps the best example – resulting in an offspring with the genomes from both parents. Again this offspring essentially represents a new species. When these ‘freak’ reproductive events occur there are continuing fertility issues. But fertility is a BIG matter. If you can’t pass the fertility test, you have no fitness whatsoever. If you have some fertility – however compromised – then you get to play the evolution lottery. If you play long enough there is hope some of your offspring will eventually evolve higher levels of fertility at which point you’re not just playing… you might start to dominate. Why? Resilience.
Just imagine having two different playbooks to draw upon. Having difficulty dealing with a pest based on one play book – check out the other. If two heads are better, then two (or more) genomes are pretty cool too. Better still, if you now have two genes for a single purpose, you might not need them both and one can undergo mutation without you losing the ability to do what they were originally meant to do. This is called neo-functionalization and to me is a really cool trick. Now resilience and potential new tricks (not originally available in either playbook) are a powerful combination. But there is the pesky fact that you have to be able to reproduce both the playbooks. This requires far more DNA in the nucleus. Size becomes a consideration.
But hold on… maybe the extra size isn’t such an onerous drawback. If you find yourself bigger you might have physical advantages as well. And what if some lazy hunter gatherer animal should come upon your bigger self and find your seeds easier to gather (they are bigger after all). And now what if said lazy hunter is just accidentally observant enough to find that he can deliberately grow your offspring for his own purposes? Wow, domestication – you’ve REALLY hit paydirt. Eventually our lazy hunter has made a real leap in the survival lottery himself and you get to tag along for the ride. He now has a vested interest in taking care of you even when your double playbook and your evolving bag of tricks don’t have the immediate answers. There might be the occasional potato blight to deal with, but this lazy ape has so many tricks of his own that you’re ordering Pina coladas and basking on the beach.
Animals don’t tolerate polyploidy very well. Sucks to be us
Chris:
The polyploidy bit above was penned while waiting for a plane… I hadn’t seen your comment above (which looks like I’ll need to keep looking through to the two previous posts – they look good on first blush).
I’m not ignoring what you’ve so eloquently put together.
Thanks for your further comments Clem, and your lucid explanation of polyploidy. I read James Hancock’s book ‘Plant Evolution & The Origin of Crop Species’ where he talks quite a lot about polyploidy, though to be honest some of it was a bit over my head. But he seemed to be suggesting associations between polyploidy, increased heterozygosity and the perennial habit…though it wasn’t clear to me whether the heterozygosity was associated with the polyploidy or just with a greater tendency to outcrossing among perennials. Anyway, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this – presumably the heterozygosity is why perennial crop propagation is so often clonal? The polyploidy of wheat is interesting also – since it’s an annual seed crop, are there any obvious reproductive disadvantages associated with its high ploidy level?
Regarding failure, I agree with you that there’s often a silver lining to failure, even to small farm failure (perish the thought…), and I’m all for accentuating the positive. The problem I have with it really is when the economy is loaded in such a way as to make failure more likely for some kinds of people and some kinds of enterprises than others – especially when those ‘others’ attribute their success to a sense of their own superior qualities, rather than luck or a loaded dice. If we’re talking about evolutionary rather than economic failure, I still think there’s often quite a lot of luck involved, but maybe there isn’t such a thing as a loaded dice in nature?
“associations between polyploidy, increased heterozygosity and the perennial habit” – will have to scratch the noggin a bit on that. If I can find some time I’ll have a look at Hancock’s book.
I do know a little about wheat, soybean, and corn; their ploidy issues and annual vs. perennial natures. All three of course are widely grown, grown from seed, and behave quite predictably despite having somewhat complex genomes. And in a sense this is a selected aspect… essentially the reason they are grown on such a wide scale. There are perennial members of the wheat and soybean germplasm, and while I’m not positive I suspect there may be perennial corns (there are perennial sorghums and sugarcane – tropical grasses not too far from corn). So annual vs. perennial is not immediately related to ploidy.
Apple and strawberry both have seriously bizarre ploidy issues and I won’t pretend to understand how apple and strawberry breeders manage to work with them. I bring up apple and strawberry though as fine examples of domesticates that are propagated clonally – a far more expensive means of propagation vs. direct seeding – but due to perennial habit one doesn’t need to propagate every year.
Canopy architecture, shade tolerance, drought tolerance, flooding tolerance, and many other plant traits have very significant impacts for local adaptation and for suitability for given applications. Heterozygosity is roughly equivalent to diversity… they aren’t the same thing, but lets run with that for the moment. If the germplasm for a species has lots of diversity and we as a species can figure out how to propagate it for our purposes in an economical way then its a fair bet we can breed the species and through selection and agronomic (or horticultural) management research we can create new forms of the species that can serve as crops in our agriculture. [I should also allow for these ‘species’ including animals… my plant bias is obviously too strong]
By ‘new forms’ I’m thinking of new varieties first, but we needn’t stop there. Wheat is grown for several different purposes and is so specialized it has several different market classes (hard vs. soft, red, white, durum, etc) – yet it is possible to cross among different classes. Corn also has several markets – popcorn, sweetcorn, dent, and flour types. Again, these different types are cross compatible. Soybean can be used for edamame which is more a vegetable crop (harvest of immature pods like green beans) or as the grain most are familiar with. So different forms add to the diversity piece of the overall domesticate relationship.
Great Post, I will read Mak, I have read van der Ploegs book which I liked a lot. I am afraid the hope that the market will reward small-scale farms and artisanal producers may prove to me a bit delusional. SOME will of course survive as such, but by and large the treadmill moves on. I expand on this on
http://gardenearth.blogspot.se/2013/09/why-competition-is-unsustainable.html