Monthly Archives: July 2012

Just the right size not to fail

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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.

Against gurus

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One of the first books I read when I became interested in sustainable farming was Masanobu Fukuoka’s classic One Straw Revolution. His four principles of natural or ‘do nothing’ farming – no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding, no chemicals – seemed powerful and persuasive, and his results – superior yields, superior income, less work – seemed to speak for themselves. Throw in a humble, life-affirming, Buddhist-inflected nature philosophy and it all amounted to a pretty attractive package for an impressionable would-be farmer.

With five years of commercial growing now under my belt I’ve just re-read the book. I wouldn’t say that my enthusiasm for it has waned, exactly, but I think I’m now in a position to ask some tougher questions of it. For example, Fukuoka himself pointed out that ‘do nothing’ farming doesn’t necessarily mean ‘no work’ farming. But how much work? At several points in the book he referred to ‘the young people who come to the mountain huts’ on his farm and helped him voluntarily in his work. Well, how many young people? How much work did they do? Fukuoka claimed good rice and barley yields, but over what areas and with how much labour input? He also claimed better financial returns for natural farming, because of low input costs and less need for cosmetic quality control. And, most fundamentally, he used a permanent clover sward for his staple crops which he didn’t till, simply weakening it by flooding – a model that few others seem to have succeeded with, except for large-scale conventional no till farmers using herbicide applications.

Now I’ve never been to Fukuoka’s farm, or even to Japan, and I have no reason to doubt his achievements, nor any intention to do so. What he did obviously worked for him in the particular ecological and economic context in which he farmed. I’m sure he was an excellent farmer. But it does seem to me interesting that – given the many apparent benefits of his methods – rather little progress has been made in advancing them. Perhaps he was lucky with the relative prices of inputs and produce for ‘natural’ vis-a-vis ‘conventional’ farm products when he was farming. Certainly, there seem to be few organic or ‘alternative’ growers around in the UK at the moment who are doing better financially than their ‘conventional’ counterparts, and the organic market here is in rapid retreat. Perhaps Fukuoka was also lucky with his water sources and with the pest-predator balance on his farm. Or perhaps he was just unusually clever, and figured out better ways of dealing with the various problems he faced as a farmer than the rest of us (I imagine his background in plant science helped, for all his thunderous criticisms of the scientific mindset).

It doesn’t really matter – reading his book again, I learned from it and reflected anew on my own farming practice. In that sense, once again I found his writing useful and inspiring. But it does matter if Fukuoka and others like him are elevated to the status of gurus or, worse, systematisers and doctrine-mongers whose practices it is assumed can simply be transplanted anywhere else. When that happens, the original insights are coarsened. So for example a useful analysis of why tillage is often problematic becomes a simple injunction: thou shalt not till. In this way, someone from whom other farmers might learn becomes elevated to an impossible ideal against which their own efforts can only be judged negatively. It’s at around this point that useful exemplification becomes hagiography, or even deification.

These are times when many people are looking for better and more ‘natural’ ways of doing things, amid a widespread distrust of science, technology and the ideal of progress. In many ways I consider myself part of that movement. But I distrust gurus, sages, prophets, messiahs and snake oil salesman. I don’t consider Fukuoka himself to be any such thing, though there are people around only too willing to elevate him and others like him to such a status – as for example in this debate hosted by the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia. If our own farming fails to live up to the standards of natural farming set by the likes of Fukuoka it may well be because he was a better and more insightful farmer than us, or because he was luckier than us with history or geography. Or both. All that anyone can do is reflect on the practical lessons for themselves. But I think we should avoid doctrinaire conclusions that we failed because we weren’t ‘proper’ natural farmers, incapable of following the path laid down on tablets of stone (or, in Fukuoka’s case, international bestsellers) by the founders. That’s the path of religious sectarianism, and at the end of it lies ossification and irrelevance.