Here’s three random facts that I’ll try to weave into a worthwhile post. First, it’s proving to be one of the worst growing seasons in the UK that anyone can remember. Second, UK dairy farmers have been planning to strike in order to secure a fairer share of the retail value for their products. And third, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter – whose classic book The Collapse of Complex Societies I’m currently reading – argues that complex societies often arise as ‘energy averaging systems’ which are able to offset agricultural failure in one area by drawing in resources from elsewhere.

I’ll start with a bit more on Tainter’s thesis. He argues that various civilisations – the Maya of Mesoamerica and the Chacoans of the North American southwest are two he considers in detail – developed when smaller-scale subsistence-oriented cultivators banded together in larger polities as a means of avoiding subsistence crises when harvests failed locally.

Part of that package includes the emergence of organisational infrastructure and elites to oversee it, the latter diverting more than their fare share of resources to their own ends, all of which ultimately has to be paid for by the activities of the cultivators, or the peasantry if you will. But in the early phases, these developments can generate a successful dynamic – agricultural innovation and intensification, subsistence and military security, the development of the arts and sciences, and so on. As time goes on, though, further investments in complexity generate fewer benefits, while imposing greater burdens upon the producers, to the extent that the disadvantages of complexity can begin to outweigh the advantages to the mass of the population, or to client states. When that happens, the conditions for civilisational collapse are created. Most commentators writing about collapse tend to treat it as a disaster, but Tainter points out that this is only a partial view. People may actively choose collapse as a better option than the diminishing returns offered by a moribund civilisation. So for example the Germanic successor states to the Roman empire offered most people what they most wanted – peace and prosperity – at less cost than the empire had, even at the expense of providing a less sophisticated scientific and artistic culture. That, at any rate, is a very brief summary of a long and complex argument.

Meanwhile, back home here in Somerset 2012 has been a truly dreadful growing season, with crop failures left right and centre, and even bankers such as courgettes struggling to come through. Wholesale prices for UK veg have skyrocketed as a result of the shortage. That should be thoroughly good news for growers like me, except that – living as we do in a complex civilisation, indeed probably the most complex global civilisation ever – elaborate energy averaging mechanisms are in place to ensure that there are no local food shortages, and that greedy farmers can’t clean up. Most of them involve whisking food enormous distances around the world from wherever it’s cheapest to grow. Which is good news for consumers, at least in the short-term, but not so good for growers, who have become a kind of global neo-peasantry, footing much of the ecological, social and economic bill for all of this complexity. Certainly, our experience at Vallis Veg this year has been a big drop in customer numbers – people are willing to support us over the supermarkets up to a point, what with our friendly, local, green credentials, but if we’re still giving them swedes and cabbages in June, then the supermarkets begin to beckon.

I won’t criticise anyone individually for making that kind of decision, but what we’ve created collectively and globally in this way is a food system that tends always to undermine local farming cultures and to immiserate farmers, albeit some more than others, to the benefit of middlemen and consumers. Hence the motivation of the UK dairy strike. In global perspective, that’s a course of action only possible among relatively well off farmers, but for those who are comfortably employed in contemporary Britain I don’t think the significance should be underestimated of a group of self-employed, relatively poorly paid, and relatively unorganised farmers telling their fellow citizens that enough is enough.

The broader question raised by all this for me is what is the right size for a well functioning food economy (which ultimately is the same question as what is the right size for a well functioning economy)? If the economy is very small and localised, then there’s a risk that real hardship will result with the inevitable annual fluctuations in productivity. Nobody wants that, and so people will naturally band together to create a larger economic safety net. But we delude ourselves if we suppose that allowing the economy to grow to any size increases our economic security – a supposition usually accompanied by self-serving ideological noise about the benefits of globalisation and market discipline. All that does is create farms, like banks, that are “too big to fail”, without adding anything to net human benefit (in fact, subtracting from it).

I think such farms and banks will fail, for roughly the same reasons that Joseph Tainter argues most complex civilisations ultimately fail. And I think it will be a good thing when they do, even if it means that many people will have to live less sophisticated and less expansive lives. I don’t think we’ve yet reached the stage when the disbenefits of current civilisational complexity are apparent to most people living in the charmed circle of modern western society and its global spinoffs. But those disbenefits are pretty apparent to anyone attempting to run a farm, and even more so to anyone attempting to run one with ecological or sustainability objectives in mind. I suspect they’re growing more apparent to ever-widening segments of the populace. But even if civilisational collapse can sometimes be the wisest choice, it’s rarely pretty. So the sooner we start thinking about the proper size for our food economies and how to achieve it the better. That little problem is one I propose to tackle in another post. In the mean time, I’d welcome any thoughts.

Yesterday I went to an equipment sale of an organic grower who’s closing down. I picked up one or two bargains, which was nice – but not nice enough to compensate for the sadness I felt. It wasn’t just the uncomfortable feeling that at the next sale I attend it might very well be me doing the selling, but also the feeling that each of these occasions is one more small example of how badly wrong we’re getting our food system.

If you believe certain ideologues then yesterday’s event was a necessary evil – the tough love of the free market in action, ensuring that only the most innovative and efficient producers get to stay in business, thereby helping to reduce prices and ratchet up productivity. If I’d been around two hundred years ago I might have been one of those ideologues myself, because back then they were probably right. Most of the land was in the hands of the gentry and there was little of the so called ‘market discipline’ around to ensure that prices weren’t inflated to suit the interests of the landholding class. So when the founding fathers of economics such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo formulated their theories of how markets ought to work – with the market’s ‘invisible hand’ finding an equilibrium between competing consumers bidding the price up and competing producers bidding the price down – it must have seemed a revolutionary doctrine for revolutionary times.

Things turn full circle. Nowadays food markets – most markets, actually – are dominated by a few retail behemoths, the new gentry of our age. For although it may be in the interests of society as a whole to have healthy competition between numerous firms, it’s in the interests of any particular firm to eliminate their competitors – which is what the retail giants have done, very ruthlessly.

Well, doesn’t that just go to prove that the big retailers are the best competitors in town? I’m not so sure. Maybe it did once, but in each cycle of market loss and gain financial advantage accumulates in the hands of the victors until sheer market dominance and financial speculation replace resource efficiency and technical innovation as the main route to business development. When I studied economics I was taught that for markets to work efficiently it was necessary to have ‘innumerable’ producers to prevent excessive rent-taking. Currently four companies control 75% of the retail food market in the UK. The Office of Fair Trading – whose job it is to prevent monopolies in order to ensure market discipline – believes that ideally there ought to be another five. Ah well, I suppose nine is a better approximation to ‘innumerable’ than four. But the truth is that the retail giants don’t dominate because they’re more supple and innovative. They dominate because they displace as many costs as possible onto others – taxpayers and farmers, for example. They dominate because they create low-cost food out of ecological rent. And they dominate because they use capital and market control as a weapon.

The way this plays out on farms around the world is this: anyone wishing to invest in the long-term ecological or social wellbeing of their farm or their community loses; anyone seeking to replace cheap but polluting inputs such as fossil fuel with costlier but more sustainable ones such as human labour or site ecological services loses; anyone who refuses to shave margins by investing in larger and newer plant loses. And a lot of people who do none of those things lose too. Our research shows that at Vallis Veg we produce food with much greater energy and carbon efficiency than large-scale farmers and supermarket retailers – but those aren’t the grounds on which market efficiency is judged. And this, ultimately, is why farm concentration continues apace and the farm sales go on.

Defenders of the status quo often point out that the big operators usually started out as small concerns, the implication being that somebody starting a smallholding or a corner shop now can aspire to replicating the same business success if they’re good enough. But when Jack Cohen started the market stall in East London in 1919 that was to become Tesco, I wonder what share of the national food market the four biggest grocery retailers had – I’d be willing to lay a bet that it was a whole lot less than 75%. Anyone starting out in food retail today is looking at a ladder swiftly receding into the sky.

I always find it intriguing to think of parallels between the natural and the social world. Is retail monopoly just like ecological succession? A bare patch of earth is initially colonised by a riotous multitude of pioneer plants, which have evolved good strategies for spotting an opportunity and quickly moving in. But as time goes on they fall by the wayside, replaced by a smaller number of strongly competitive plants such as forest trees, which block the light and strangle out the competition. I can think of two main differences between ecological succession and market succession. First, although the climax ecological community may be dominated by a smaller number of main species there are still innumerable niches for other species to find their place (way more than nine, at any rate) – like bluebells flowering in the spring woods before the big trees have gained their leaves. I like to think of local veg box schemes as the bluebells of the retail world. Unfortunately, the retail giants can do what no forest tree has ever managed and turn themselves into bluebells too. Hey, you want fresh locally grown food delivered to your door? Well, we can provide that too, and provide it cheaper! It’s not so local, it’s not so ecological, it’s not so socially beneficial, but who’s asking?

Second, the ecology of patch dynamics shows that ecological dominance is always provisional. The forest trees may dominate for now but it’s a dangerous world – a storm blows the trees down, or they’re laid low by a fungal disease, or a lumberjack, or an elephant. In nature, there are endless opportunities for renewal. The climax community of the forest has never managed to do what the climax community of the retail world has done, and create governments or Offices of Unfair Trading to police its interests for it and vigilantly crush any signs of retail renewal. One advantage of the ecological community is that it builds in redundancy and resilience, so that when the forest giants fall there are other organisms ready and waiting to take their place. Will anyone be ready if the retail giants fall?

I apologise if this post sounds angry. I do feel angry that good farmers are going to the wall for no good reason. But I don’t know what to do about it other than rant on my blog. If you’ve got some better ideas please post them below!

Last week I went to the Oxford Real Farming Conference. When I got back I discovered that our packing tent had blown away in the gales, which just goes to prove that you should never, ever leave your farm for any reason, least of all conferences and other such trifles.

But leave the farm I did, so I thought I might as well make the most of it by reporting back on the conference – which actually was excellent in many ways, and well worth attending (packing tent excepted). My admiration extends as ever to Colin Tudge and Ruth West from the Campaign For Real Farming for making it all happen.

I don’t have the space to summarise everything I heard at the conference, but fortunately I don’t have to because the critical issues were mostly all encapsulated at the very end in a barnstorming 15 minute closing speech by Professor Tim Lang of City University. It was provocative stuff which seemed to offend some of the farmers in the audience. Certainly, it raised some challenging issues that all of us – consumers, food activists, policymakers, academics and the corporate food industry as well as farmers – need to ponder. In the rest of this post I’m just going to offer a few first blush responses to some of the things Professor Lang said from my perspective as a local agroecological grower.

Here’s a very condensed summary of Professor Lang’s injunctions to the conference multitudes: focus on food, forget about farming – only ½ a percent of the workforce is directly involved in farming, and few people outside it understand the issues it involves. Earlier in history, people left the land in droves because they didn’t like being ripped off by the landed classes so they moved to the cities where they engaged in urban food activism – allotments, and so on. The most innovative thinking about food today is still being undertaken by urban activists. Them, and the transnational corporations, who can see the writing is on the wall for the present food system and are busy inventing the next one. The alternative farm movement is behind the game. To catch up it needs innovations, one of which must be to shift away from arable and stock farming and towards horticulture.

Actually, writing this down now I can see why some of the farmers were annoyed. But since I’m essentially an urban food activist turned small town market gardener (a glorified allotment gardener, really) can I award myself a pat on the back for seeing some years ago the way the world was going and getting involved in urban market gardening, just as Lang enjoins? Maybe, but somehow my sympathies lie more with the struggling farmers than the with-it urban food activists.

Let’s look at some figures. The town of Frome where I live has a population of about 26,000, and an area of about 830 hectares. Let’s suppose, generously, that a full quarter of that (gardens, parks, allotments) can be given over to food production, and let’s suppose that everyone exclusively grows potatoes since this is the most efficient crop in terms of calorific output per unit area (see previous post) – though we’ll leave a 30% fallow because we may not be able to rely on the NPK gravy train forever. On this improbably generous basis, by my calculations the spud-eating denizens of Frome could grow at an absolute maximum around 25% of the food they need within the city limits. In reality I’d be surprised if we grow even 1% of the food we consume here inside the town.

So while the most innovative thinking about food may be going on in towns, the actual production of food is mostly going on elsewhere. There are lots of good reasons to support the urban allotment movement, but urban food self-reliance isn’t really one of them – so maybe as well as defending tiny patches of green space within our towns, we should all be thinking a bit more carefully about the acres of green space surrounding them.

What’s going on in this peri-urban zone? Here in Frome, a bit of woodland, some horseyculture, some arable and dairy farming, and my market garden. Now, I think Tim Lang is right that we should be shifting the balance away from agriculture and towards horticulture – a much more labour and land intensive form of production. Indeed that was the main point of my previous post. If we were to do so, in order to feed itself Frome would have to spill out of its current bounds and become a garden city of urban peasants, or else it would have to fill its hinterlands with veg box peasants serving the city, which amounts to much the same thing (interestingly, Hugh Ellis of the Town & Country Planning Association has pointed out that the idea of urban green belts, when it was first mooted, was to create space for farmers serving local markets to live and work, and not to prevent ‘development’ as such).

I think it would be great if this happened. But it would involve many people returning to small-scale agriculture – and I think the potential for that is there, not least because historically most people didn’t jump from the countryside but were pushed. We’ve never yet experimented with a society of independent smallholders, but there remains a palpable hunger in this country for land to make productive.

The reason that I feel more akin to the farmers than the food activists, though, is that before we can make any of this a reality we need a much more thorough public debate about where our food comes from and its true cost – financial, environmental and social. In the absence of such a debate, a small commercial market garden on the edge of a town served by a plethora of supermarkets can be a pretty cold and lonely place to be – trapped as it is between the vicious race to the bottom of global food commodity competition going on within the farms in the surrounding countryside, and the noble but ultimately limited food activism in the town. Consumers and even food activists rarely understand the commercial pressures facing agroecological market gardeners, whereas the corporate food sector understands them only too well – which is why they have tried and largely succeeded in trampling them into the dirt.

A sub-theme of the conference that Tim Lang only touched on was how to find the big political narrative that can drive this debate forward in concrete detail. A reformist, enlightened capitalism – agricultural renaissance – or a true revolution in landownership and farming? I sensed the anger of some delegates at the way the current property regime denies people access to land (aspiring entrants to farming often think that getting access to land is the major problem; those of us lucky enough to have surmounted that hurdle often ruefully reflect that our battle has barely begun). But I heard few nuanced proposals charting either path. Some people said there was no need to go back to Marx – we just need a properly functioning market in food. Personally, I think we do need to go back to Marx – partly for his ever-relevant critique of capitalism, but also by way of witness to the pathological twist that his thought took in the hands of followers who invented the collective farm. We also need to go back to the likes of Adam Smith and David Ricardo to understand how fresh and promising capitalism might have seemed in its early days as it battled with landed wealth, but also again to witness the pathological turn it’s taken in modern transnational monopoly capital – the worm that was already present in the seed. I’d like to have heard more from Professor Lang about the innovative thinking going on amongst the transnationals. I find it hard to imagine that the future they’re charting will assign a role for any citizenry more noble than that of house slaves in the giant manor of monopoly capital, but perhaps I’m wrong. Manor, collective farm, smallholding – I know which one I prefer. I hope that at next year’s conference we may have started to chart in finer detail the route for getting there. Perhaps that’s a task I’ll set myself in my future posts on here – once we’ve got the packing tent sorted.