Monthly Archives: January 2012

Thoughts from an LDV van

Posted on by
2

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.

LDV Delivery Van

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.

Farm Scale Polyculture

Posted on by
Reply

As mentioned in the previous post, I attended the excellent Oxford Real Farming Conference  a couple of weeks ago. I gave a short talk at it on farm scale polyculture, and I promised I’d post something here about what ‘polyculture’ is all about. In a nutshell, the idea is that instead of growing single outputs or ‘monocultures’ (a field of genetically uniform wheat, for example), it often makes more sense to grow multiple outputs or ‘polycultures’. In my talk, I tried to address some of the many different dimensions of polyculture and illustrate how we’ve tried to implement them at Vallis Veg, with varying degrees of success.

You can download my talk here  - it’s in the form of a PowerPoint file, so you’ll need PowerPoint to read it. At the conference I simply spoke to the pictures. Here I’ve annotated them very briefly to try to convey what I said, whilst naturally losing much of the detail.

Real Farming, Real Towns

Posted on by
3

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.

In praise of potatoes

Posted on by
3

Having recently put away several festive meals which varied in all respects save the ubiquitous roast potato, I thought the time was right to pen something about this stalwart vegetable.

The potato always seems to play second fiddle to wheat. UK farmers devote 42% of cropped land to wheat, and only 3% to potatoes – even if, scandalously, around 47% of the wheat is fed to livestock (the stats are here). Potatoes also seem to come off second best in the alternative farming movement. William Cobbett, the founding father of English agricultural radicalism, wrote in Cottage Economy (1822) that the potato was “the root…of slovenliness, filth, misery and slavery”, its cultivation bringing “English labourers down to the state of the Irish, whose mode of living, as to food, is but one remove from that of the pig.” John Seymour, self-sufficiency guru of the 1970s talked sniffily of ‘inferior’ potato-based cultures, and even Simon Fairlie in Meat, his superb recent book on sustainable small-scale farming, focuses largely on grass and cereal farming, describing vegetables (presumably including potatoes) as ‘secondary and niche commodities’.

I must admit there’s a romance to wheat that potatoes lack. When I’ve grown wheat I’ve felt a connection going back through the ages of European farming tradition to its origins in the domestication of cereals in the Near East, which is not something I can say when I dig knobbly old potatoes out of the ground (Andean farmers may take a different view). But romance isn’t the point of farming, or not its main point anyway (much after all can be said in favour of small-scale farming beyond the merely practical). Farming is, or at least ought to be, about feeding people, and in this respect potatoes fit the bill.

For the fact is that Cobbett was wrong. It’s not that potatoes make paupers, but that paupers grow potatoes, because in the UK you can get more nutrition out of a given area of land by growing potatoes than by growing anything else (UK farmers currently produce 40% more calories and 5% more protein for each hectare of potatoes they grow than a corresponding hectare of wheat) – it’s even been argued that the adoption of potato cultivation in Europe saved it from subsistence crises. Hopefully, we’ll never again see the level of pauperisation that led to the potato monocropping of Cobbett’s day, but it’s likely that in the future we’ll have to think a lot more carefully about the gross productivity of agricultural land in order to feed human populations sustainably, and I suspect that potatoes will have a crucial role here.

All crops have their pros and cons, of course. On arable scales, potatoes require heavy tillage and heavy fertilisation, both of which eat up energy. They’re also a thirsty crop, they don’t store and travel with the economy of seed crops like wheat and they become a nuisance when they return as volunteer weeds in subsequent crops. But on market garden scales most of these problems diminish, or even turn into advantages. With intensive organic horticultural rotations, heavy tillage after a fertility-building cover crop followed by potatoes provides good tilth, weed control and a diminishing fertility gradient, all of which can benefit the succeeding crops. And though the greater transportability of seed crops is an advantage in some respects, it’s a disadvantage when this very mobility is used directly or indirectly as a political weapon to undermine local agricultures and agricultural independence – as has often been the case with US food aid and EU food dumping. For those of us who believe that social benefit is optimised in more self-reliant and localised economies there’s a lot to be said for shifting the emphasis away from the grain-based agricultures fuelling international commodity trading and towards a more local potato-based horticulture (I’ll say more in another post about exactly how self-reliant and local we should be aiming for). The fact that many of the major grain-exporting regions of the world are threatened by increasing aridity, salinity and soil loss is another factor weighing in favour of a local potato economy.

From a small-scale grower’s perspective, potatoes are a difficult crop because it’s hard to compete economically with large arable producers in the present economic circumstances (ie. cheap fuel and expensive labour). But I’m determined to walk my talk by giving small-scale potato growing a go over the next couple of years, using lightly-mechanised methods. My research to date has shown that this is a more energy-efficient way of farming in terms of food energy return on fossil energy input, and I suspect that this question of energy return on energy invested – currently of little mainstream agronomic interest – will loom increasingly large in future years.

So happy new year to everyone. The perfect time to get the potato catalogues out – the planting season is only a couple of months away!