The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People : farming

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (46 children)

On the topic of urban/rural divide I am thinking there is probably a third way to look at it. But yes, somewhat controversially I agree that most people should probably not repeasantize and rather live in cities for most of the time.

Sure cities come with some logistical problems regarding food supply and can't self-produce most of their food, but on most other metrics they are vastly more efficient and for the most part also more desirable places to live (which is why the percentage of urban inhabitants is constantly growing).

Basically I think only those directly involved in food production (or nature conservation) should permanently live in rural areas. But I also think there should be much more exchange between rural and urban areas, with urban inhabitants regularly staying in rural areas temporarily during summer season both for pleasure but also to help out with labour intensive harvesting tasks.

The latter probably needs some cultural shift though. Instead of getting cheap migrant labor (and treating them very badly) it needs to become more of a positively connotated thing for city inhabitants to go on "farm holidays" each year. I think this would not only help with the labour crunch in farms, but have a lot of positive knock down effects for all people involved, but of course it needs to be sufficiently mechanized to not become back breaking labour either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

As a side note: there is another mode of work - construction of things outdoors - that is also difficult to handle in a dense urban area. Welding, cutting, grinding, even mere hammering - do any of those outdoors in a densely populated place, and you'll have annoyed neighbours - and their complaint about noise / light pollution is at least somewhat justified. Leave half-processed materials around, and there's a risk of someone taking them.

In a sparsely populated area, not much of a problem. :)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That was really good, even if I'm missing some context. We on the left honestly have a blind spot for what global food production actually entails. I live on a small, previously abandoned farm that I've been slowly fixing up, getting it to at least do something, and that pretty tiny exposure to trying to make food beyond the scale of a garden has rocked my goddamn fucking world as to the politics of food.

You often see leftists very confident that going vegan is the main (or even only?) thing that we need to do to fix our food supply, and then on top of that, maybe we add some organic and permaculture or something, maybe with a dash of local first. Unfortunately, food is way more complicated than that, and we have basically no idea how to feed the entire Earth's population without heavy use of fossil fuels as both inputs and fuel, even if we all go vegan, no matter how much I'd personally love a local-first permaculture world where all our lawns are tomatoes or whatever.

If you're interested in this topic, Sarah Taber also writes about it a lot. She shares this essay's view on the dangers of food nostalgia, though she tends to focus on the American obsession with the family farm, which is actually an insanely inefficient and stupid way to farm (I can now personally attest to this), from both a modern and historical perspective.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, some interesting thoughts.

Going mostly vegan would definilty open a lot of land for other farm uses, both grazing land that could be converted to tree orchards and conventional agricultural fields currently used to grow maize silage, but I agree that it would not solve the fundamental issue of temporary food insecurity in many places.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

The thing with animal agriculture is that it's efficient in terms of capitalism. We are really good at growing corn and cutting hay with virtually no human labor, and then we can very cruelly stick all the animals in one giant torture lot to feed them. The perishable product comes out year round, so you can invest in an efficient and constant supply chain without a complex warehousing situation, and corn/hay/silage/whatever is easy to store.

I don't see any way to a sustainable, ecologically sound, less cruel food system within capitalism. It's going to involve a lot more human labor. Even if we want to eat mostly grass (all grains are grass) like the cows do, and, as mentioned in the OP, like our peasant ancestors did, which wasn't a particularly nutritious way of life, we still have to deal with the fundamentally unsustainable way we grow grains today: Spraying pesticides (including herbicides and insecticides) to literally kill everything but the special pesticide-resistant corn, and dumping petrochemicals that are nutritious to the corn itself but devastates the topsoil, and so on. Our farmlands today are functionally productive deserts.

In the US, we are functionally incapable of growing anything labor-intensive without migrant labor. Even where I live, in Vermont, with the most hippie dippy organic farms per capita going on, all our beloved orchards that aren't pick-your-own rely on seasonal Jamaican migrants, whose special visa status also includes artificially set wages by the federal government, otherwise it just wouldn't work. All our economically sustainable dairy operations rely on illegal migrant labor, because there is no dairy visa since it's not seasonal. Everyone I know who wants to farm has a job doing some sort of farm regulation thing instead, like organic certification, and they farm on the side, often barely breaking even -- all this while hunger, especially child hunger, is rapidly increasing in our area.

Basically, the entire thing is fucked.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Okay, I've read half way through before realizing that this is part of a fight (discussion?) between two prominent proponents of urbanism/tech and small-scale farming?

I know where my heart is - with the small scale farmers. However mentioning the heart would already disqualify me from this discussion.

I also know that I am 110% the well-fed food-nostalgist who has her imported coffee in the morning and her self-raised pork and home-grown veg at night. Why? Because that's how far I manage to go with my skillset to keep at least some of traditional knowledge alive.

I think there is something deeply dishonest in the numbers he presents - for one, he mentions famines with political causes. Lets be honest - most of them are - so not small-scale farming was to blame, but colonization or insane top-down political decisions. Then, about how yields are calculated: how do you calculate the yield of a truly biodiverse farm? Between animals, vegetables, energy in form of wood, energy and nutrition in form of manure and mushrooms I might have over 50 species here, plus the ones I forage. Try and compare this to 'x tons of [crop] per ha'.

What we see in the numbers of famine and today's feeble attempts to recreate traditional farming is that colonization, urbanization and industry has caused an enormous loss of skills. With every displaced person who had to leave their family garden we lost a small patch of high density food landscape and the skills to tend it.

I also don't understand why Monbiot accuses people of wanting to go back in time. It's a bit unfair, because nobody really goes and 1 to 1 recreates the farming life of last century (unless you are in a cult or sth). We combine old and new, we use electricity, we get stuff in from elsewhere if we must. We actually start reconsidering which tech is worth using, and which does more damage than good.

Wanting to recover the traditional tech that was good and useful and got destroyed by industry or politics isn't hollow nostalgia. Wanting to shorten food transport chains where it's possible isn't promoting starvation.

Nah, I can see where Monbiot is coming from in some way. A lot of the homesteading nostalgia movement, especially when people are just starting out with it, is so naively optimistic, so arrogantly sure of itself while proposing their way as the only way ... But to reduce the small-scale farming movement to just this is dishonest and is not the discussion the green left (if such exists) should be having - but hey if those bros want to write whole books to fight each other let them do it.

TLDR: Tradition yes, tech also yes. Stop fighting dudes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Regarding the famine topic: I understood that differently. I think he is saying that (previously quite common) famines are all but eradicated except for those caused by political issues like wars etc. I think this is true and easy to overlook as indeed there is a mostly well working global market to transport grain surplus over long distances (although the Ukraine war has shown it is more brittle than most people assumed).

Small scale farming does not really produce large quantities of grain surpluses that can be easily shipped around the world or stored in large emergency stocks.

In a way this is of course more efficient, because why produce such surpluses that outside of emergencies have no real use and need to be sold cheaply to be converted to industrial alcohol or fed to industrial livestock factory farms.

But the question is, what can replace those large grain producing farms as a stabilizing factor counteracting natural variability of regional food production? Sure, localized backyard farming helps a bit, but I think it is likely insufficient and mainly helps against malnutrition by supplementing main staples with additional food of higher nutritional value.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

You mention somewhere that you think people move to the city mostly because living conditions are better, I think that is only true in some cases. Sometimes, conditions in their rural home regions or homelands are made unliveable for political reasons, so people are forced into cities. Some people are being made promises about their possibilities in a city. Sometimes a mix of both. Not every rural family who ended up in a city ends up thriving.

I'm also still somewhat suspicious about big grain and the numbers presented. Are we really working with accurate numbers here, or are these numbers incidentally collected and published by big grain and their friends from the fossil fuel industry? I remember having read something about small farm producing a majority of the food, only to find out that it refers to these numbers from the World Economic Forum of all places, where a farm is considered small at under 200 hectares which is just plain ridiculous. The article then goes on about big almond/pistachio farmers, more of those super-food growing water wasters and landscape destroyers. So all these numbers are made up by somebody with one interest or another, and paper is patient, as we say in German.

I guess this whole discussion suffers from one enormous problem: both sides go on a lot (often based on a very blurry understanding of history) about 'people should', which is

decidedly un-anarchist and
causes proponents of the opposite opinion to fear that they will be re-peasanted/urbanized by force.

I believe the preference for rural/urban or any spot on the spectrum in between the two is diverse, and close to the heart/identity side of a person, maybe comparable to gender. At least it is like that for me. Moving out of the city and re-peasanting myself was a very early step of self-confirmation for me, and setting myself up with the right mix of rural and urban is important to me. If I was forced to live in a city (at least the currently available versions of cities) I would be considered mentally disabled very probably. And it being as clear and obvious as this for me meant it took me forever to understand that this didn't mean that living rural is 'the right thing to do'^TM^ , but that each person has their preferences, and that some people are happily and fully urban.

What I think we could do, instead of argueing what is better, is recognize the difference between these poles of the urban/rural spectrum and recognize they exist. I imagine, in a caricature of the real thing, some academically educated urban folk, all clean and sitting politely at a table, and a horde of mud-slinging peasants has their elbows perched on the other end, spitting while they speak and smelling funny, and hopefully some translator to aid the conversation. The challenge is in understanding where each side is coming from. The tendency of some young people to want to change their surroundings (like me from urban to rural, and the other way around for many kids who grew up rural) can help with providing a living bridge between the two 'cultures' (not sure what a friendly, but difference-affirming term could be?) in a solarpunk future, maybe.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

As for the numbers, sure big agriculture is good with lobbying governments, but the author of the OP article is a relatively well known environmentalist from the UK that did a lot of research on this for his recent book. I find it rather unlikely that these are fudged numbers from lobby firms.

But I also think people are misunderstanding what he mainly says. He doesn't say that relatively small scale farming can't on average feed the human population, but rather that our current model of resilience against the natural variability of food production (which is going to get much worse with climate change) is build on a massive overproduction of cheap grains that can be easily stored and shipped around the world.

Unless we want to face massive naturally induced famines again, we either need to maintain this model (which seems increasingly unlikely to be physically possible) or urgently find another way to improve food resilience, and small scale farming doesn't seem to be able to do so.

And on a side note: brutal conflicts between small scale farmers and nomadic people that are reacting to natural variability of food availability are almost as old as humanity itself, and really not a future I would like to see on a global scale.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Obviously rural areas need some people involved in agricultural production year round and I never said anything else.

But I do think that it is somewhat of a problem that the majority of the rural inhabitants have very little to do with any of that these days. Add to that the continuing encroachment of sprawling suburbs that destroy valuable farmland and you really have a set of extremely unsustainable living conditions only made possible due to the cheap supply of fossils fuels.

Solarpunk Farming