Category Archives: Vallis Veg

Spudman rides again

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Regular readers of this blog will know that Spudman, my superhero alter ego, has been fighting a battle with Mendip District Council for the right to live on my land like a proper farmer (a planning officer at Mendip once told me that I wasn’t a ‘proper farmer’ – it’s now my badge of honour).

Our farming activities have been on a bit of hiatus since last autumn, largely as a result of the planning situation, and I’ve seriously contemplated trying to find a less stressful and more remunerative line of work. But once an improper farmer always an improper farmer so we (that is Spudman and the long-suffering Mrs Spudman) have decided to recommit to our small-scale farming vision, and have therefore appealed to the Planning Inspectorate against Mendip’s decision.

If you’re minded to write to the Inspectorate in support of our plans, this page on our website tells you how. If you live locally, or have agricultural expertise and can vouch for our view that intensive small-scale horticulture requires an onsite presence, then so much the better.

I’ll keep you informed of Mr and Mrs Spudman’s progress.

Meanwhile, after our exertions producing last week’s mammoth posting, the Small Farm Future team is going to take a break next week. But please don’t forget about us – we’ll be bringing you more pearls of wisdom from the frontline of sustainable agriculture soon, including ‘ode to a wheatfield’, some features on organic farming, a wry look at the permaculture design certificate, news of Small Farm Future’s growing academic respectability, another look at perennial agriculture and breaking news of an agricultural techno-fix that may just solve all humanity’s problems in one dig. So see you soon…

 

For peat’s sake

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Last week I sold on a few organically-certified bags of reclaimed peat seed compost that I’d bought from West Riding Organics and received some negative feedback about the use of peat from customers who apparently hadn’t realised that the reclaimed peat I was selling was based on, er, peat. The episode raises some wider issues that are close to the theme of this blog, and has prompted me to think a bit more about them, so I thought I’d give them an airing.

The basic problem is that peat is pretty much the best substrate for seed compost, but you can only get it from the slowly accumulating vegetable detritus of wet moorlands, which are rare and sensitive habitats, and also ones that sequester carbon. So digging it out for gardeners at rates far greater than it’s being deposited isn’t a sustainable practice.

Reclaimed peat is peat that has been eroded out of moorland habitats and washed into lakes and reservoirs, from where the enterprising folks at West Riding Organics filter it out, fiddle about with it a bit and then sell it to the likes of me. The West Riding Organics website states “It must be stressed that this is a result of natural erosion with man playing no part in its formation”, but according to one customer I spoke to views of this kind are ‘weasel words’.

Why? Well, I can’t speak for my customer but one possible problem is that the erosion is only partly ‘natural’, with at least some of it (how much?) resulting from human practices that exacerbate the erosion. Another possible problem is that there’s nowhere near enough natural erosion to satisfy the demand for seedling compost.

Actually, I don’t think the second objection stands up. No, there isn’t enough peat to go around, but if some of it is knocking around on the bottom of a reservoir then there’s a good case for filtering it out and doing something more useful with it. The same argument applies to the recycled chip fat that I use in my van – we can’t fuel the entire global vehicle fleet with chip fat, but that doesn’t mean that a few of us shouldn’t make use of the resource. The first objection is potentially a problem though. On reflection, my view is that it’s still worth making use of the eroded peat – it’s not doing any good where it is, and it can’t be put back. But if it could be shown that the market for reclaimed peat was in some way directly incentivising land management practices that contributed to the erosion of moorland, then I think I’d avoid buying it. I don’t think using reclaimed peat is ethically tainted just because it’s peat, but if its use is directly contributing to moorland erosion then I’d have to accept that it is ethically tainted. And I don’t know whether it is or not – it would be good to find out.

For me, there are three wider issues of interest here encompassing (1) trust (2) farm economics and (3) growing practices. A few brief comments on each in turn.

My customers bought the compost without researching the details because, touchingly, they trusted my ethical integrity as a sustainability-minded grower. I don’t suppose they’ll be making that mistake again, dammit. And I suppose I in turn bought it without researching the details because it’s organically certified, so implicitly I placed my trust in the Soil Association to have researched the details for me. That’s basically what third party ‘ethical’ certification is all about, as when we buy fair trade coffee in the supermarket for a few pence extra and feel like we’re good people. But since my whole ‘small farm future’ schtick is basically about direct relationships of trust between producers and consumers then I’m somewhat hoisted by my own petard on this one. The only thing I’d say in my defence is that I was pretty explicit in my message to customers about the source of the compost, which just goes to show how much people’s trust of individuals can obscure attention to the fine print. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe peat compost will have to go the way of cigarettes, with ‘PEAT COMPOST KILLS WETLANDS AND CAUSES DISEASES OF UNSUSTAINABILITY’ marked in huge letters on the bag. Maybe people will go on buying it anyway, just like cigarettes.

Oh what the hell, I’m going to say two other things in my defence as well, which come under the rubric of the other two wider issues – first farm economics. As a ‘direct producer’ I would love it if I really could produce everything directly. When people visit our holding they often ask, ‘do you save all your own seeds?’ or ‘do you make all your own seed compost?’ In fact, we do try to do a bit of both, but the honest answer is ‘I’d love to but I can’t even earn a living wage spending all my time just growing vegetables’. As I’ve said before on this blog, the economic reality of farming is that fossil energy is cheap and human labour is dear, and this fundamentally distorts the social ecology. Whether it’s possible to farm sustainably at all in the long view of human history is a moot point, but it’s certainly not possible to farm sustainably in contemporary Britain. Which means all of us have to make personal decisions about what we will and won’t do for the sake of our sustainability principles, decisions that are endlessly open to the scrutiny and criticism of others.

And so to the final interesting issue, growing practices. One decision I’ve made is not to import any manures or composts onto my holding…well, er, other than seed compost that is. There are various reasons for that, but the main one is that even supposedly ‘organic’ compost relies directly or indirectly on fossil fuel intensive synthetic nitrogen, and I think we need to experiment with other ways of producing our food. It’s worth bearing in mind that organic growers have to use something like 25 tonnes of soil-building compost per hectare, as compared to something like 250kg of seed compost for the transplants that go into the same area. I think importing the seed compost is a lesser evil. Of course, seed compost doesn’t have to be peat-based, but it pretty much does if you use a soil blocking system for transplants, which I’ve found to be the most effective way of establishing transplants – and effective germination has sustainability implications of its own. Seedling substrates are a big issue for organic growers, because there are very few products available that do a good job without having sustainability implications of one kind or another (coir being the main alternative to peat). If you don’t buy organic it’s pretty likely that there’ll be peat in them thar vegetables, the transplanted ones anyway. What are the solutions? Well, I’m open to suggestions, but everything I can think of involves greater costs, and – if my customer surveys are anything to go by – people think organic veg costs too much already.

Conclusions:

1: I ought to have found out a bit more about the erosion processes associated with reclaimed peat, and whether the market for it incentivises poor land management, rather than relying on the Soil Association to do it for me. I’ll invite West Riding Organics to comment on this.

2: it’s a lot easier to be a sustainable domestic gardener than a sustainable commercial grower, and it probably pays better too

3: but if you really want to be a sustainable gardener don’t import compost of any kind. Period. Or much of anything else for that matter.

I’d be interested in comments on this post, or thoughts on other dilemmas of sustainability facing growers and gardeners.

A spring tweet

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Exciting news: I’m now tweeting my blogs. If someone had told me last March that I’d tweet my blogs in a year’s time, I wouldn’t have believed them, and the March before that I’d have contacted my doctor to ask if he could offer prophylaxis. Such is progress – which brings me to the topic of farming, technology and progress. But hold your horses, that’s for next week (oh all right, here’s a taster). Anyway, I’ll tweet you about it.

My id, for the twitterati amongst you, is @csmaje since unfortunately @smallfarmfuture is already taken by some Welsh smallholders, and all the best to them. But by a remarkable coincidence it turns out that everybody in the Small Farm Future office – from myself as editor-in-chief, to the staff writers, production team, technical support, estates and buildings and even the tea boy – just happens to be called Chris Smaje, so maybe it’s not such a bad id after all.

Also being announced via Twitter is a new series of articles by yours truly on the topic of social science statistics, which is being published on the website Statistics Views. You can see my first article here. The articles aren’t specifically about food and farming issues, but I’m hoping that some of them will be. The cardinal difference between my Statistics Views articles and the ones here on Small Farm Future is that I get paid for the former, so do please forgive me if my posts on here get lower priority from time to time. If you’d like to rectify that, please send cheques to me at Small Farm Future, Dream On Boulevard, Never Never Land. Thank you.

Pressure of work, including the onset of the new growing season, is such that my posts may get a bit more peremptory over the coming months, but I still have some good things coming up – with posts on agricultural technology, agrarian populism, golden rice (again), wheat, planning permission (again), Via Campesina, perennial grains, tackling hunger, global commons (again), more thoughts on grass, anything that the new growing season throws up and a topic dear to many men’s hearts, does size really matter? So please do keep reading.

As a small taster for some of these forthcoming posts, here are a few interesting links: The World Bank has a new report out arguing that African governments need to open up to agribusiness instead of allowing themselves to be overrun by all those pesky smallholders. In other words, the World Bank’s new report is a lot like many of the World Bank’s old reports, bless. But those pesky smallholders somehow keep on farming. Some more nuanced and conflicted perspectives on global agriculture, poverty and smallholder farming emerged at a conference on food security organised by The Economist.  But not nuanced enough for Robin Bourgeois of GFAR, whose thoughtful post makes the case for taking smallholder farmers more seriously (eg. by thinking to actually invite some of them to conferences about smallholder farmers), and for not assuming that the planet can sustain demand-led resource use at US or EU levels. Amen to that. I’ve got Gordon Conway’s book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World in my in tray, and I’m looking forward to reading it and posting more on this topic soon. But next week: farming, technology and the Amish.

Oh, and talking of spring tweets, we had a great wildlife walk at Vallis Veg yesterday with the folks from the Somerset wildlife trust – with skylarks and lapwings above, chaffinches and great tits twittering (properly) in the hedges, and barn owl feathers, shrews, badger footprints and other offerings from the foxes and the badgers to keep the kids amused. Keep an eye on our events page over at Vallis Veg for future dates if you’re local.

 

Roe kill reflections

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Last summer, we woke up one morning on our market garden site (yes I know we’re not allowed to live there – just don’t tell the planners) to find a young roe deer buck lying on our track which had clearly died there overnight. Puzzled, we asked wildlife expert Simon King, who lives nearby, if he could figure out what had happened. He diagnosed a kill by another buck, showing us the wounds where the horns had penetrated the abdomen.

Never ones to look a gift deer in the mouth, we then butchered the animal – its abdominal cavity was a terrible mess, with ruptured intestines and extensive torn tissue. It had obviously been a brutal encounter and we felt for the deer, which must have suffered a painful death. But you could scarcely imagine more ethically-sourced meat, and we got about four generous and highly delicious family meals out of it (plus a huge plateful of offal which didn’t go down quite so well). An example of nature’s economy in action – in which, as environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott puts it, value doesn’t pass from hand to hand like money in the human economy, but moves in the form of energy from stomach to stomach.

Simon placed the deer’s entrails on the ground and set up a trailcam alongside it. You can see for yourself what happened next on his blog.

Looking at the episode from Callicott’s ‘nature’s economy’ perspective sets you thinking. The chances of a tasty carcass pitching up like that on our doorstep were pretty remote. And even then, it took us quite a while to get the whole thing butchered. You can understand where all those Garden of Eden type myths come from, with their notions of feeding at will from a bountiful nature – a topic on which Callicott has published a superb essay, surpassed only in its insight and sophistication by a similar offering from a certain Chris Smaje.

Out of Eden, though, humanity has had to go looking a bit more actively for its food – initially by gathering and hunting, then by farming, and finally by intensive gardening. I’ve posted on this blog previously about returns to marginal labour and competing visions of the agricultural future. Could it be that future ‘sustainable intensification’ will turn out not to involve ever larger and more high tech tractors micro-managing uniformly high yielding transgenic crops, but a neo-peasantry (OK, let’s call them market gardeners so as not to scare anyone) micro-managing their endogenous soil nutrients through long hours of labour so as to squeeze every last bit of nutrient out of their domains? Perhaps you could look at the market garden and the roe-kill juxtaposed on our Somerset field as two extremes of human provisioning. Or else you could look at them as two examples of exactly the same thing – deer and humans enacting the same ultimate struggle to wrest a livelihood from the land so as to survive and reproduce.

Mendip and Spudman

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I posted a couple of weeks ago about the high tech farming of the future. Little did I know that the planning officers at Mendip District Council already have their own distinctive vision of high tech farming, which they’re ready to roll out right now.

In refusing our planning application for agricultural residence the officers stated that theft and vandalism on the site are better deterred by “increased site security from gates, floodlights, alarms etc”, that crop protection can be taken care of “by an alarm system triggered by a thermometer, allowing workers to respond according to conditions” that predator attacks can be neutralised by “automatic doors for poultry houses” and that wind damage is “unfortunate but avoidable”.

I must admit that the frustrated superhero in me is quite taken by these proposals. Picture me brooding in my Frotham City mansion. The red phone rings. Emergency! I slide down the pole into my Spudmobile and race off to the smallholding (it’s not clear why the planners think this results in less travel than if I lived on site – perhaps they’ve already developed a zero energy transporter, Star Trek style).

Upon arrival, I flick a switch – the security gates roll open, the floodlights blaze into action. Kerpow! Oof! I make short work of the thieves and vandals. They won’t be coming here again for a while, no sir. “Calm yourself”, I yell to the wind, which dies down at my command before it can unseat the polytunnels or the packing tent. The poultry door slams down on a marauding fox, decapitating it instantly (of course it would never think to come out during the day before the timing switch kicks in). I pick a few hundred slugs off the cucumbers in the polytunnel – tomorrow I will sell the cucumbers for 86p each, thereby funding all this high tech gadgetry, with enough left over for Mrs Spudman and I to go to the pictures on Friday night. I drive home slowly, tired but satisfied from my night’s work. Girls swoon as they see me driving past in the Spudmobile.

An attractive vision for some, perhaps. But here’s an alternative one. I wake up in the farmhouse early in the morning. Mrs Spudman has already left for her job in Bristol – thank goodness at least one of us earns a decent wage. Before I make the kids’ breakfast, I nip out and check everything’s OK with the livestock and the seedlings. After the kids are in school I spend the morning working in the market garden. At lunchtime I go into the farmhouse and cook something for myself, do a few domestic chores and then go back outside for the afternoon’s work. After the kids are back from school I do a bit more work in the market garden, then cook dinner. After they’re in bed, I go out and check the livestock, chase away a fox, wave angrily but not entirely ineffectually at the pigeons, feed the cat after its day of roaming in search of rodent prey, check the temperature in the propagator, pick some slugs in the polytunnel, sit and read for a bit, then go to bed. If a strong wind blows up in the night, I get up and make sure everything’s OK. If a frost comes down, I make sure the tender plants are safe. If it starts raining heavily, maybe I get up and sow the cover crop that was just waiting for the rain. If I find somebody creeping around the barn who’s “just looking for their dog” I tell them to bugger off. So it goes on.

It’s a radical vision, I admit, but it just might catch on if only there was a good name to sell the idea with. Hey, why don’t we call the place where I’m growing the food a “farm”? And we could call the person who lives there a “farmer”. So much less energy use, driving and hassle than the planners’ preferred option. It’s a wonder no one thought of it before.

Of course, people used to grow vegetables on peri-urban sites like ours to feed the local population. But then it turned out it was cheaper to buy it all in from other places in the world where there’s more sunshine and fewer trade unions. It was more worthwhile to sell off all the old farmhouses and outbuildings for non-farm residences, to push rural land prices up beyond any possible returns from agriculture, and to create big, energy-guzzling farms growing subsidised commodity crops for national or global markets. Cheaper, but not sustainable in the long run. If only we could somehow reclaim that small farm vision. If only people were allowed to become farmers again. If only…if only…