Beyond ideology: making the case for small-scale farming

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Chris

I keep coming across the notion currently that ‘ideological’ support for small-scale farming is problematic and that no particular level of farm scale can be regarded as optimal – ideas which are obviously at the heart of this blog. I’m inclined to respond with the thought that there is no such thing as an ‘unideological’ position – it’s a cardinal error to assume that the mainstream way of doing things must somehow involve less political baggage. And if indeed it’s true that no particular level of farm scale is optimal, then surely the time has come for a massive investment in small-scale farming, since it’s historically been so starved of funding and influence compared to its industrial-scale counterpart.

Matthew Fielding of the Stockholm Environment Institute recently blogged about the superiority of larger-scale commercial farms over small peasant farms in dealing with the problem of climate change in low income countries. He was kind enough to respond to me when I challenged him over the evidence for some of these claims, suggesting that you can’t compare low tech smallholder farming with high tech commercial farming – in which case I’d argue that he shouldn’t have done precisely that in his original post!

It’s true that such comparisons can be tricky (especially because the multiple and sometimes intangible benefits of small-scale farming are often harder to demonstrate than the benefits of larger scale farming) but there is a need for them, because otherwise it’s too easy for the ‘unideological’ proponents of the industrial farming status quo to dismiss small-scale farming as an irrelevance – as for example in the shocking refusal of Mid Devon council to entertain the Ecological Land Coop’s planning application for smallholdings at Greenham Reach on the basis of claims such as smallholdings are not ‘serious farming’.

An interesting paper written by Peter Rosset over ten years ago now suggests the following benefits of small farms compared to their larger scale counterparts:

diversity
environmental benefits
empowerment and community responsibility
places for families
personal connection to food
economic foundations
better overall output and factor productivity

According to Rosset, small farms in both high income and low income countries can bring greater social and environmental benefits, as well as turning out more product and more money per hectare than larger farms (by the way, I use the word ‘can’ in that sentence with no compunction, in just the way that ‘unideological’ mainstream commentators often say things like “produce grown abroad and shipped here can be less ecologically damaging than homegrown produce”).

I’d be interested in any comments on Rosset’s list – any things to add, any things to take away or qualify? For me the three overarching categories of local food cultures, local or human-scale economies, and output are key, as indeed are future energy and climate change scenarios. What would a large-scale farm in a situation of major energy constraint look like? Two obvious historical precedents are the medieval manor and the slave plantation – neither of which, I’d suggest, are inspiring models for the agrarian future. In any case, I’ll try to fill out some of the points on Rosset’s list with both further reflections and further research results in future posts.

Gardening or Forest Gardening?

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Chris

It seems likely that in the coming years climate change will make parts of the world increasingly uninhabitable and their lands increasingly uncultivable, leading to population movements towards the remaining cultivable areas. At the same time, energy prices will probably continue to rise, resulting in a situation where more people have to be fed from less land using fewer inputs. What would farming look like in that situation, and what kind of societies would result from it?

An army of technocrats and associated cheerleaders are hoping to engineer their way out of this troubling situation. Who knows, maybe they’ll succeed – at least temporarily. In the mean time, permaculturists and many in the alternative farming movement are focusing on more homespun small-farm solutions involving labour intensification, close resource husbandry (soil, water, energy) and the like. But of course we don’t really know if that will succeed either.

Maybe we can get some kind of inkling about the likely ecological and social shape of a future intensive small farm society by looking at examples of such societies from the past. Like colonial Indonesia, for example, as analysed by Clifford Geertz in his book Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia. It’s an old book, first published in 1963, and I have to admit it’s one of those classics that I was supposed to have read in college but never did. Still, only about twenty years later I’ve put that right, and I think what Geertz says is of interest when applied to our contemporary predicaments.

Geertz contrasts two indigenous forms of Indonesian agriculture – the swidden (‘slash and burn’) agriculture of the forest and the sawah agriculture (wet rice paddy) of the cleared terraces. Swidden involves cutting and burning primary forest, and then reseeding the cleared area with a complex interplanted polyculture of annual and perennial root, leaf, seed and woody crops, using leguminous crops and the ash as fertiliser. After a few years of production, the cleared plot is left to return to secondary forest before being cleared once more after a lengthy fallow period. Swidden was often regarded as an irrational and destructive agriculture by earlier generations of western analysts, but Geertz and other anthropologists of the 1950s and 60s showed that it was subtly adapted both to the needs of the farmers and the ecology of the forest – it was “a canny imitation of the natural landscape” in which “a natural forest is transformed into a harvestable forest” while retaining the same basic form of the natural ecosystem. In other words, its logic was a lot like that of the temperate forest gardens that have been popularised by the permaculture movement.

Of course, the two aren’t identical. For example, swidden is mobile because tropical forest soils are generally poor with the majority of ecosystem nutrients being held in living biomass which has to be unlocked through burning. Mature forest trees also need felling in order to establish more manageable and useful woody crops. Forest gardens, on the other hand, can take advantage of nutrient rich soils in temperate climes and of modern dwarfing rootstocks. But both are ways of mimicking early woodland succession to preserve perennial polyculture while diverting it to human ends.

One problem with swidden mentioned by Geertz is that, despite its complexity and its preservation of ecosystem properties, what he calls its ‘equilibrium’ is a lot more delicate than that of natural forest. Managed badly, swidden easily leads to ecological deterioration, and the replacement of forest cover by invasive grasses that create ‘green deserts’. One way this occurs is through population pressure – if the fallow period is excessively shortened, or the system is otherwise overdriven to divert more of the nutrient cycle into extra human mouths then productivity decline and ecological deterioration result. In other words, the system isn’t expandable.

Not so with sawah, according to Geertz. The stability of the rice terrace as an ecosystem, he says, means that “even the most intense population pressure does not lead to a breakdown of the system on the physical side (though it may lead to extreme impoverishment on the human side)…the sawah seems virtually indestructible”. The output of the rice terraces can be “almost indefinitely increased” by what Geertz calls “careful, fine-comb cultivation techniques”, in other words by intensive gardening (horticultural) rather than agricultural techniques: pregermination, transplanting, exact spacing, careful composting, meticulous weeding and harvesting.

Perhaps we could express these contradictory tendencies of swidden and sawah in the jargon of economics. A lot of jobs can be more easily completed when there are more people to help (“many hands make light work”). Indeed, often each extra (or ‘marginal’ in economic jargon) person contributes as much or even incrementally more to the final result – there is constant or increasing marginal productivity of labour. But there comes a point when adding yet more workers starts to have a proportionally lower effect (“too many cooks spoil the broth”) – there is diminishing marginal productivity of labour. That point of diminishing returns is reached quite quickly in the case of swidden, to the extent that adding more workers (ie. experiencing population growth) threatens the very ecological viability of the system. But with sawah marginal productivity doesn’t seem to decrease– you can achieve constant returns to labour.

It’s interesting to apply this marginal labour analysis to growing methods in drier, more temperate climates such as here in the UK. So for example forest gardens are often extolled for their abundance and designed redundancy. You’re never going to pick all their fruit, all their edible leaves and other goodies. But it doesn’t matter – it’s there for the picking if you want it, and if you don’t it’ll fill the belly of a bird or a beetle and somehow cycle its way back through the system into a future crop.

I think that makes a lot of sense given the nature of the present UK economy. Most of us don’t need to grow food for subsistence, but most of us don’t have much spare time either, so if we’re going to grow food it makes sense to opt for a low input system like a forest garden (besides its ecological advantages over other growing systems). Suppose, however, that we face the situation mentioned at the outset of rising food and energy prices and a rising local population. Growing space is now at a premium, and you have to start looking to your forest garden as a real source of subsistence. You used to harvest its best-looking apples and plums, grab a few welsh onions, snip the occasional herb, and then pretty much leave it alone. Now you go back to it, looking to reap more of its abundance. The wineberries are pretty tasty, but crikey it’s a lot of work fiddling about with all those little fruits. How many orache leaves do you need to pick for the family lunch? And where exactly has that walking onion wandered off to? I strongly suspect that, as with subsistence swidden, diminishing marginal productivity of labour will quickly kick in, and the cleverly redundant abundance that you designed into it might start to seem more redundant than abundant.

Let me be clear that this is in no way intended to be an argument against planting forest gardens, but it is an argument – or at least a hypothesis – about the returns to labour that forest gardens may furnish. Temperate forest gardening is still in its infancy, so maybe people will come up with forest garden designs with good marginal labour productivity. But only if we think about the issue – simple advocacy for abundance too easily neglects it, and this is an important omission in David Holmgren’s discussion of the ‘maximum yield fallacy’ in his influential book Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability (p.159). For while he’s right to criticise mainstream approaches for focusing too narrowly on single yields at the expense of considering secondary yields, without considering marginal labour productivity those secondary yields can all too easily turn out to be rather theoretical. Holmgren asks us to contrast a high energy input monoculture with a low energy input polyculture to suggest the superiority of the latter. But Geertz’s analysis suggests that in situations where low energy input is a given, high labour input monocultures or near monocultures may sometimes outperform low labour input polycultures in terms of marginal labour productivity.

So would the same hold true for a future low input UK agriculture? If the forest garden doesn’t yield enough, can you bend your back a bit more in the intensive vegetable garden to make good the deficit? I suspect our temperate dry-land staple crops don’t offer the extraordinarily constant returns to labour that Geertz reports for sawah. I haven’t yet located any useful data on marginal labour productivities (either on a per unit area basis or otherwise) – and indeed Geertz himself is a bit coy on the hard numbers when it comes to Indonesian sawah. I’d be interested to hear from anyone with some relevant figures. But in the absence of proper data, here’s a few factoids:

The highest reported rice yields are 5.21 times higher than global average yields, whereas the corresponding global figures for wheat and potatoes (the two key UK staple crops) are 5.03 and 5.06 (source – trusty old Wikipedia).
Average UK (arable) wheat yields have increased fourfold since the 1880s as a result of technical developments such as synthetic NPK fertiliser, dwarf cultivars and fungicides, currently averaging around 7.8 tonnes per hectare (but each subsequent yield-increasing technique is likely to offer incrementally less).
In his excellent book Small-Scale Grain Raising Gene Logsdon reckons that a small grower in the temperate USA can grow about 6 tonnes of wheat per hectare, enigmatically adding that “a really good wheat grower with a little luck” could double that yield (apparently the world record wheat yield is 15.6 t/ha by a New Zealand farmer).
John Jeavons, doubtless a really good wheat grower – and one who has the luck to live in Southern California – reports wheat yields for his biointensive methods of 12.7 t/ha.

Actually, given that Jeavons’ methods are highly labour intensive, maybe a comparison of his maximum yield figures with national average yield figures might give us a handle on marginal labour productivity (though of course his methods don’t only involve applying more labour). Taking the ratio of Jeavons’ maximum productivity to average US productivity (derived from pages 143, 151 and 153 of his book How to Grow More Vegetables…8 edn) his figures are as follows:

Potatoes 9.3
Rice 6.3
Wheat 4.9

So maybe rice meets its match with potatoes as the temperate staple to focus labour intensification around (though presumably his rice figures are based on dry cultivation, not paddy). Well, I hate to say I told you so, but millions of Irish peasants can’t be wrong (…or can they?) Actually, I find some of Jeavons’ figures rather curious. And few organic gardeners I know in the UK manage to match the average arable potato yields here of about 45 t/ha, which – to put it mildly – is some way below Jeavons’ maximum yield of 382 t/ha. I’ll try to come back to this topic with some better data in the future.

So where does all this lead? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure, but inasmuch as climate change and rising energy costs might force us to intensify agricultural productivity with low input methods in the future, I’d predict that in the UK we might see relatively little use of techniques like forest gardening, more use of techniques such as orchard silvo-pastoralism, more people working harder to produce smaller yield increments of staple crops (potatoes?) and a worrying convergence between actual demand and theoretical maximum supply for such crops. In other words, we might see a UK farming landscape that doesn’t look too different from the traditional small-scale mixed farming of our forebears. Which maybe shouldn’t be too surprising since indigenous agricultures have generally figured out better than anything how to feed local populations maximally in the context of energy constraint.

In the past, Europeans managed to revolutionise local food availability by various means: technical innovation, exporting people or importing food through colonial or trade relationships. I suspect that none of those options will be so easily achieved in the future, which will mean people may have to work harder for less reward to earn their bread. A big issue that this raises – and that Geertz’s study also touches on – is what society would look like in those circumstances. But that I’ll leave to the next post.

Of Potatoes and Potato Co-ops

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Chris

I extolled the virtues of potatoes in a recent post, and in this one I’m returning to the issue with a little more hard data (or hard-ish, at any rate) having just completed an analysis of the energy balance, labour inputs and costs of various scales and methods of potato production. The motive behind it was partly to research the possibility of establishing a local potato growing co-op in Frome where I live – if you’re local and potentially interested in this, please have a look at the full document Notes on Forming a Potato Co-op in Frome, (also posted on this site’s Research page), and get back to me with your comments. If there’s sufficient interest, then this may be something that we could take forward locally.

But I think the analysis may be of wider interest and applicability, so if you’re not local but are interested in sustainability and small-scale farming, I’d still appreciate your comments on my analysis and methodology, or on their implications. The data are in the spreadsheet of underlying data accompanying the document. In particular, if you have any experience or knowledge of potato-growing at any scale from back garden to large-scale arable farming I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on my assumptions and the values that I’ve used in the different models. Are the assumptions sound? Are the values entered in the spreadsheet plausible? If you have any other published data or, even better, unpublished data that you’ve collected in the course of your own potato-growing, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve spent a long time fiddling with the data, agonising over various assumptions, correcting mistakes and so on – I could probably carry on doing so indefinitely, but maybe now is the time to dispatch it into the collective mind of the blogosphere and see what comes back to me.

Just to summarise briefly my findings here, I looked at five different scales/methods of potato production:

large-scale mechanised ‘conventional’ growing using synthetic agro-chemicals (to feed 2,000+)
largish-scale mechanised agroecological growing using green manures for fertility (to feed 150+)
smallish-scale semi-mechanised agroecological growing using green manures (to feed 15-60)
domestic scale non-mechanised agroecological growing using green manures (to feed 1-2)
domestic scale non-mechanised ‘organic’ growing using imported manure (to feed 1-2)

The results suggest that broadly speaking unmechanised domestic-scale production is the most energy efficient, but the energy advantage quickly dwindles if you start trucking in manure or driving to allotments. I conclude that there’s nevertheless a good case for establishing local potato co-ops on the basis of semi-mechanised, small-scale agroecology, or even larger scale agroecological growing at a pinch – but you’ll have to read the report to find out why!

More broadly the analysis shows the trade-off between energy input and labour input with the different scales of production. What sort of farming system do we want – an energy-hungry, labour-light one or a labour-hungry, energy-light one? An advantage of small-scale agroecology is that it may work as a compromise between the two extremes. But I’d be interested in your thoughts – so please post them below…

Fertility is in the air, or why no dig systems may not be so great after all

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Chris

Spring is in the air, the buds are bursting, the birds are at their nests, young lovers are canoodling in sunny parks, and – before I get too carried away – farmers are spraying s**t all over their fields. For indeed it is fertility in the latter sense that is my topic in the present post.

I’ve talked about woodland and grassland in recent posts, so I feel that I should now complete the set by talking about cropland. With cropland, fertility is a key issue, and I’ll come to it in a moment. But first I want to say something about the permaculture movement, which I mentioned in my last post. Permaculture has been increasingly influential on many home gardeners and urban environmental activists. It was certainly what first influenced me to start thinking about food production and environmental issues. But it’s had less influence on commercial, broadscale growing, the game I’m currently playing. I suspect that many permaculturists might argue that this is because broadscale growing is behind the game. Permaculture emphasises no till growing, perennial crops and maximum crop diversity, whereas commercial growing – and commercial farming even more so – remains stuck on the treadmill of tillage, annual crops and monoculture.

That may be a fair criticism, but I believe there are grounds for commercial growers not only to justify doing what they do, but to return fire to the permaculturists, for cherished ideas such as no till and perennial polyculture can easily become ill-considered dogma. I have no wish to set up an argument just for the sake of it. What I hope to have suggested by the end of this post is that there’s merit in both viewpoints, and together they may help us chart a more considered path towards achieving a long-term sustainable agriculture.

So, coming back to fertility, the first point to make is that our crop plants are hungry things and cropland is hugely more fertilised than is generally the case among wild ecosystems. In stable wild ecosystems, most plants are adapted to cope with low nutrient inputs, or else with irregular pulses of nutrient input (such as when a passing animal urinates in the vicinity) – often being helped in the latter case through association with mycorrhizal fungi (source: J. Philip Grime, Plant Strategies, Vegetation Processes and Ecosystem Properties). In fact, something like half of all the world’s soluble nitrogen results from human agency (source: Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth), which is pretty bad news because this uses a lot of non-renewable energy and causes water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss.

All that is true of organic as well as synthetic fertiliser, although the problems may be less in the organic case. It’s probably easier for conventional farmers to give their crops the correct amount of fertiliser exactly when it’s needed, but on the other hand synthetic fertiliser probably has higher energy costs and is more soluble, and hence potentially more polluting.

I say synthetic fertiliser ‘probably’ has higher energy costs, because in the organic case a lot depends on where the fertility comes from. Suppose that you buy in a load of municipal green waste compost, or cow manure from a conventional farmer, or horse manure from a local stables. You need to factor in the source of the fertility and the costs of getting it to your site: organic manures are bulky, with low nutrient densities, so once you start trucking them around the energy costs quickly mount up. If they’re from conventional farms then they’re likely to derive ultimately from energy-intensive industrial synthesis, and the same is true if they’re from a stables – or at the very least they’ll derive from a rather questionable land use. I’ll provide some specific figures to back up these claims in a future post (you can also find some on the Research page). It might be argued that the green waste or the animal manures are waste products that might as well be used by organic farmers, but I’m not convinced. If those fertilisers were reused at source it would save drawing down more non-renewable resources in fertiliser manufacture for the next input cycle, and save on transport costs as well. Organic growers buying in fertility in this way are feeding off the bloated body of the fossil fuel economy – it’s a bit like driving to the bottle bank with a few empties in order to ‘save’ energy.

So what are the alternatives? Well, there are a few, but the only one I find really convincing as a general strategy is to grow legume-rich cover crops (‘green manures’), particularly clover – an approach covered in depth in Jenny Hall (now Jenny Griggs) and Iain Tolhurst’s brilliant book Growing Green. The main problem with this from a permaculture perspective is that you can’t easily establish crops into a clover sward; the clover needs to be tilled in first, and according to permaculturists tillage is to be avoided. There are five main reasons why:

it uses (fossil) energy
it can lead to soil erosion
it can damage soil structure
it kills soil biota, including mycorrhizae
it brings up weed seeds

For these reasons, a lot of domestic-scale gardeners decide to adopt ‘no dig’ methods and import the fertility from offsite, which isn’t difficult on a garden scale. This isn’t really an option for larger-scale growers, because you can never find and transport enough manure and compost, and this draws you into leguminous leys and tillage. But of course if you perform an energy audit, a thousand home gardeners each importing a ton of compost is not energetically better than one farmer importing a thousand tons of it (in fact, it’s almost certainly worse). Furthermore, I think the objections to tillage should probably be rewritten as follows:

it does use energy, but not as much as trucking in manure, especially manure deriving ultimately from synthetic fertiliser.
it can lead to soil erosion, but in moist temperate climates with heavy soils such as here in western Britain it doesn’t have to – as is evident from the fact that people have been tilling soils here for many centuries. The same isn’t true of arid places, like much of Australia where permaculture was first formulated and where tillage is much more problematic.
it can damage soil structure, but if you’re careful when and how you till much of the damage can be avoided
it does kill soil biota, especially mycorrhizae and larger fauna such as earthworms, but if you’re dumping a huge amount of nitrogen and phosphate onto the soil then mycorrhizal action is of limited relevance anyway, the more so because important crop groups such as brassicas and chenopods aren’t mycorrhizal. Tillage replicates early-succession bacterially dominated soils which are what vegetable crops require, so although in an ideal world the destruction of soil biota is best avoided it’s not necessarily that problematic for crop growth.
it does bring up weed seeds in my experience, although different methods of tillage do it to different degrees and some authorities even argue that some types of tillage can reduce the soil weed seed bank (source: Davies et al Weed Management For Organic Farmers). Ultimately weeding is a price that growers have to pay for interfering in the ecological succession – and no till growers have to do it too by weeding out incoming seed drop, or dealing with the consequences of weedy manures.

All things considered, I think it’s preferable to grow green manures and till them in rather than adopting no till systems based on imported fertility. I think the permaculture movement and other alternative farming advocates have erred in putting too much emphasis on tillage and too little on input provenance. I don’t doubt that the ‘organic’ gardener who slaps down huge amounts of imported compost can achieve impressive vegetable yields…but then again so can the conventional grower. We need a whole system approach that focuses on achievable sustainable yields.

But green manure systems are still quite crude, amping up the nutrients and potentially resulting in the same problems of over-nitrification that I mentioned earlier. And when all is said and done, it’s best to avoid tillage whenever possible. How wonderful it would be if we could replicate wild ecosystems, with our crop plants adapted to low nutrient input and nutrient pulsing through mycorrhizal associations. That would be true permaculture farming. But let us not run before we can walk. I don’t see the logic of adopting a no till approach on the grounds that it’s more ‘natural’ and then unnaturally importing truckloads of factory-derived compost. Why not first of all focus our efforts on better nutrient cycling, and on optimising organic crop rotations so as to keep tillage to a minimum?

Seven Arguments for Grass

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Chris

I was talking about woodland and grassland in my last but one post before I so rudely interrupted myself to have a rant about supermarkets and farm closures. So let’s get back to the subject of grassland.

Since most of us have had little more experience of grass than as somewhere to play in our parents’ gardens it’s not surprising that we often struggle to think of it as a crop. But grass can be extraordinarily productive (worth thinking about before you go and exercise your dog in some poor soul’s silage field), with the additional benefit of providing a zero till, year round, perennial ground cover of the sort that makes permaculture aficionados drool.

The big problem with grass is that unfortunately it’s inedible, at least to us humans, and the only way we can farm it usefully is by taking advantage of ruminant livestock and their gutfuls of friendly bacteria to turn it into meat, milk, fat, wool and hide, thanks to their 40 million year co-evolutionary dance with the grasses. And the problem with that is that it’s quite an inefficient way of getting nourishment into our bodies, as a million tonnes of vegan promotional literature is only too happy to point out. To make matters worse, ruminants belch out a load of methane which adds to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

In upland areas where it’s not possible to grow anything other than grass there’s a case for farming ruminants. And in lowland areas where the farmer wisely decides to do without factory-made fertility and to create fertility on-farm instead by sowing grass and clover in rotation with arable crops (aka organic farming), there’s also a case for farming ruminants – but in this case the grass has to be temporary and so some of the benefits of perenniality that get permaculturists so excited are lost. Harder to justify on the face of it is keeping lowland farms down to permanent pasture, when the land could be put to more productive uses.

At Vallis Veg, about 25% of our lowland farm is down to permanent pasture – which of course I wouldn’t dream of admitting publicly if I didn’t already have a raft of excuses reasons up my sleeve to justify it. So here they are – please read them and then tell me why I’m wrong.

The greenhouse gas emissions scenarios involving ruminants are complex – ploughing up permanent pasture or transforming it to low productivity uses such as woodland also create emissions, either directly or indirectly in the case of uses that displace agricultural productivity onto ‘ghost acres’ elsewhere. A case can be made for ruminants when they’re incorporated into a productive, mixed agricultural system. The emissions associated with extensive ruminant systems are easily overstated, obscuring more significant sources such as fossil fuel use. Some people, such as Graham Harvey in his book The Carbon Fields, even suggest that ruminants on permanent grass can be highly productive and even carbon negative through the medium of carbon sequestration in grassland soils. I think this takes the argument a step too far. But a good case can nevertheless be made that there is no simple equation of ruminants with environmental ‘bads’.
To farm sustainably probably requires that most fertility inputs are produced on the farm itself. So the farm needs both fertility-making and fertility-taking parts, with grass being an ideal example of the former and ruminants an important low-energy vector between the two (in the absence of synthetic fertiliser, permanent grassland can be as productive as fertilised temporary grass leys).
Pasture is an extensive land use that allows large areas of land to be managed effectively with relatively small inputs of human labour or fossil energy. This contrasts with cultivated ground which is demanding of labour and energy. In the present economic climate, neither land use is financially remunerative so there’s a case for mixing and matching between the two – at Vallis Veg we can’t manage more cultivated land than we already have in cultivation, and no one is queuing up to take on land from us to cultivate. Actually that may not be quite true – I gather there’s a waiting list of around 90 people for allotments in Frome. But suppose we ploughed up all the permanent pasture and rented it out to people wanting allotments. Where would they get the fertility for their veg from? Doubtless by trucking in loads of manure, the fertility in which ultimately derives either from a fertiliser factory or from someone else’s grass, or both. Keep fertility local, I say.
If well-managed, permanent grassland accumulates fertility over time that can if necessary be ‘cashed in’ through more intensive uses at a future date. Keeping an area of ruminant-stocked permanent grassland on the farm can therefore act as a buffer for future agricultural needs.
Related to the preceding point, permanent grassland is a ‘neutral’ form of land use, which is relatively easy to maintain in its existing state – it can easily be turned into more intensive (cropping) or less intensive (woodland) land uses, but each of these are more committing and less reversible forms of land use.
Going back to the permaculture movement, various interpretations of permaculture involve emphasis on perennial over annual crops, maintaining ground cover and valuing traditional local agriculture. Permanent pasture involves a mostly perennial permanent ground cover and is a traditional form of land use in southwest England where Vallis Veg is located, and where grass grows especially well.
Ruminants furnish a variety of useful products, as mentioned above – meat, milk, fat, hides and wool. Non-ruminant derived substitutes for these are often of more exotic and energy-dependent origin.

A slight flaw in my grand design is that currently we don’t actually have any ruminants on our permanent pasture. But hopefully we soon will. At present we don’t live on our site and to be honest running a market garden from afar is hard enough without having to worry about a bunch of sheep and cows as well. But we’re hoping to get planning permission to live on our holding. If we do, we’re aiming to keep ruminants on the grass as well as run the market garden and create good nutrient linkages between the two. If we don’t then we’ll probably mothball the market garden, giving us the time to bring in some ruminants and look after them. Unless of course you can spot any flaws in my reasoning and tell me why we should do something entirely different with the grass…

Thoughts from an LDV van

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Chris

I spent last Wednesday travelling to East Yorkshire and back to collect our brand new delivery van, the old one having spectacularly failed its latest MOT. Well, it’s brand new for us anyway (at 7 years old it’s precisely 22 years younger than the average age of the Vallis Veg vehicle fleet to date). So this post naturally has to be about transport and fuel, a lengthy drive across the heart of England giving me the perfect opportunity to think about these things.

What struck me most as I drove was the depressing ugliness of our country’s transport infrastructure – the motorways, the service stations, the fuel depots, the mouldering railway yards, the factories and the quarries that service it all. And beyond that, the distorting effect that fast, cheap transport has on the economy, particularly the rural economy – the dormitory villages, the fields bled of productivity by pointless international price competition, the overgrown woodlands no longer coppiced because it’s cheaper to import wood from the Baltic.

What also struck me was my own participation in all of this, for was I not myself tearing along said motorways in a 1.5 tonne box of steel I’d bought in service of my supposedly ‘ecological’ farming business? And what exactly did I want instead – an unchanging, chocolate-box Britain in preference to the railway yards, which after all – as Richard Mabey showed in his wonderful book The Unofficial Countryside – have an intricate ecological beauty of their own?

It’s very easy to obsess about greening minor aspects of our lifestyles, and then unthinkingly blow all the accumulated credit in a huge fossil fuel-fest – that flight to New York, or that delivery van. We often justify these decisions on the basis of our ‘needs’, but the justifications always sound a bit hollow to me. How much do we really ‘need’ our delivery van? Well, probably more than anyone needs a flight to New York, but when we started Vallis Veg I fondly imagined that we might be able to make it work as a business by keeping input costs down, particularly polluting input costs relating to internal combustion engines. We owned no vehicles, and no farm machinery, and I had visions of forks and spades, lots of willing volunteers, deliveries by bike and so on. Now we have a van, a 50 hp tractor and a 7 hp tiller – a sad reflection of the fact that in the modern British economy fuel is very, very cheap and human or animal labour is very, very dear. I don’t know whether we really ‘need’ these machines, but I don’t think our business could survive without them (an adult human can sustain a power output of about 0.1 horsepower, so roughly speaking at the touch of a button the tiller gives me the equivalent of 70 agricultural labourers and the tractor 500 of them).

Does it matter? Well, that depends. I don’t think it necessarily matters that I as a purportedly ‘ecological’ grower use machinery. Anti-environmentalists are always quick to smell hypocrisy, but whether we like it or not all of us have to live in the world they’ve created. It’s akin to the argument that nobody who ever shops in a supermarket can criticise them – an argument that would carry more weight if the supermarkets hadn’t systematically eliminated virtually all of the alternatives.

It would matter more if it could be shown that machinery use in small-scale farming was less efficient than in large-scale, conventional farming – in other words, that big machines can get more food on your plate per litre of diesel than small ones. You hear this said quite often in relation to food distribution – that 44 tonne trucks are more fuel efficient than 1.5 tonne vans. This is no doubt true, and if the food system involved nothing more than huge trucks speeding up and down motorways between gigantic farms, then it would be a good argument for large-scale mechanised farming. But since the food system also involves people driving in private cars to out-of-town supermarkets and small vans delivering groceries to shops or door-to-door, and since the alternatives include growing food for local consumption on peri-urban sites like Vallis Veg with no need for any 44 tonne trucks at all, then that particular argument falls by the wayside.

You can ask similar questions about food production on the farm itself. Don’t big modern tractors, with all their GPS-guided gizmos and their capacity to take care of huge tracts of land, outperform somebody like me pootling around with my little 7 hp tiller? I’ve found it remarkably hard to locate any research on this, perhaps because there are now so few small-scale commercial growers in countries like Britain that it doesn’t seem a pertinent question. But inasmuch as I’ve been able to assemble some data and do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, I think the answer is no – there are no returns to scale with increased machinery size. Quite to the contrary, in fact: if energy efficiency is your goal, you’d be better off farming with a fork and spade than a 200hp tractor. You can see some of my research on this here, and I’ll publish some more in a future post.

If you take the view that there will be no long-term problems with energy supply, or with the climate effects of fossil fuel combustion, then the energy inefficiency of modern farming probably won’t alarm you. It’s not quite as cut and dried as that, because farming using fossil energy instead of human energy calls for simplified forms of agriculture, which have other implications. And it also paves the way (quite literally…) for the kind of industrialised landscapes I witnessed as I drove across England last week. Is that problem? Ah well, that’s a topic for another time, I think. And I’ll look some more soon at energy resource futures too.

But there are also complexities that small-scale, fuel-light growers such as me have to confront. When we deliver a local veg box, are we saving our customers a journey in their cars or do they hop aboard anyway to shop for other things? How, precisely, are we managing to grow more food for less energy? Can these growing systems really be generalised beyond the antics of a few mavericks like me to the food system as a whole? And if we don’t like the ‘unofficial’ countryside of a postindustrial Britain, then what exactly do we want? There’s food for a few future posts in all of that too.

Amazing, really what you think about as you drive along a lonely motorway at night…and all this was before I’d left Yorkshire. Anyway, here – should you be interested – is the van in question, in all its glorious redness.

Will I be able to resist whistling the theme from Postman Pat as I drive around delivering vegetables? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll spray it green and call myself Vegman Chris instead.

Small Farm Future

Making the case for a small farm renaissance

Category Archives: Energy and Climate Change