Organic glyphosate?

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I promised a post this week on technology and the Amish but for various reasons I’m going to hold that over for a couple of weeks – mostly pressure of work, including attending the launch of a UK Via Campesina branch over the weekend, a very exciting development. More on that in another post soon.

Still, I don’t want to disappoint my avid readers so I thought I’d tide you over with a few thoughts on glyphosate, culled from some links on Ford Denison’s excellent Darwinian Agriculture blog.

First up is this interesting discussion about herbicides and organic farming. The problem: you grow a grass/legume ley – the key organic fertility-building strategy – but then you need to get rid of it in order to plant your crop. How? In organic farming you basically have to till, which isn’t great for a whole bunch of reasons already discussed on this blog. And it’s energy intensive, which is one of the factors underlying the common refrain that organic farming compares unfavourably with ‘efficient’ conventional agriculture. So should organic farmers learn from their conventional counterparts and start killing off their leys with herbicides like glyphosate? Of course, that’s presently banned under organic standards, but maybe it’s time to rethink the rigidity of the standards and make them deal better with difficult ecological tradeoffs like tillage/herbicide. Or so says Andy McGuire in his blog post. Cue interesting, well informed and polite discussion. How refreshing.

I’ve argued before on this site that the heavy soils and moist climate hereabouts in Somerset incline me to think that judicious tillage in my situation may not be the great evil that is often supposed, but on balance it’s hard to get too enthusiastic about tillage as a wise agricultural strategy. With drier climates and lighter soils there’s little doubt that it is a great evil – soil erosion is one of the greatest threats to agricultural sustainability – and since such regions are often major food exporters this isn’t a problem that anyone can dismiss lightly.

So should we lobby IFOAM to allow glyphosate derogations? Well, it would help if President Obama could nationalise Monsanto once he’s outsmarted the NRA and removed every last gun from the US. And about as likely. Even then I’m not really persuaded about the wisdom of using glyphosate routinely, but there’s a genuine dilemma here. Other ideas discussed on the website included grazing regimens and that good old permaculture standby, mulching. Of course mulching would be great, but it’s not practical on agricultural scales – so perhaps here’s yet another argument for small-scale horticulture over agriculture. Mulching is a lot of work, mind you. And with millions of merry mulchers, you do wonder where all that mulch would come from. Invest in the used carpet trade – you read it here first.

Andy McGuire made the interesting point that glyphosate may be a once in a lifetime discovery – in other words, it won’t be easy to find another comparably effective non-selective, translocated and (relatively?) benign herbicide. A shame, then, that glyphosate resistance in weeds is already developing apace (they say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and the photo on the previous link of glyphosate-resistant corn being overtopped by what’s now glyphosate-resistant ragweed speaks volumes for what’s wrong with modern agriculture). Moreover, the possibility of direct gene flow from transgenic glyphosate-resistant plants to weedy wild plants now seems established. Be afraid. But don’t be surprised – there’s no such thing as an ideal agriculture. Pests and weeds will adapt to whatever management strategies you apply to the agroecosystem. But I’d have thought that if your management strategy involves copious routine spraying of a non-selective herbicide, then it’s fairly obvious that the useful lifespan of your chosen toxin will probably be short. Perhaps there’s another unlearned historical lesson there from the story of antibiotics.

So how about this future scenario, which appeals to my sense of historical irony? On conventional farms weed resistance renders glyphosate ineffective as a routine management measure, forcing farmers to resort to energy intensive and environmentally destructive tillage, at least until they’ve re-established some kind of crop-weed balance on their farms. Meanwhile organic or quasi-organic farmers, whose farms lack the superweeds, use glyphosate sparingly, spraying just a small proportion of their fields every few years as part of a mixed overall farming strategy, thereby keeping resistance at bay. And the press write endless accusatory articles about the inefficiency of ‘conventional’ agriculture compared to the sensible mixed strategies of the mainstream organic farmers, and gleefully point out that conventional agriculture will never feed the world. Well, everyone  can dream…

Science, Ideology and GM

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I only posted a couple of weeks ago about GM crops and Mark Lynas, but a fortnight’s a long time in agriculture (and even longer in the blogosphere), so time for a few updates.

Lynas, you may recall, is the political science graduate and some time environmental activist who’s now made his peace with corporate agribusiness, the nuclear industry etc and gave a rousing speech to the Oxford Farming Conference about the benefits of transgenic (GM) technology. One of his big themes was the need to embrace science in considering the case for GM crops. Another one was the misdeeds of the organic movement – for example, dismissing as “simplistic nonsense” the Soil Association’s arguments that people in the west should “eat less meat and fewer calories overall so that people in developing countries can have more”.

Entertainingly, this Soil Association view appears to be pretty much exactly the line taken in a new report from the UN Environment Programme lead authored by Professor Mark Sutton, an environmental physicist from the Centre for Hydrology and Ecology at Imperial College London. Which all sounds pretty scientific to me. I haven’t had sight of the full report yet, but judging from the press release it advocates “lowering personal consumption of animal protein among populations consuming high rates by voluntary reduction and avoiding excess” and it also advocates a rebalancing of global agricultural nutrient distribution from the over-nutrified west to the under-nutrified south, the effects of which would seem quite akin to having fewer calories in the west so that people in developing countries can have more.

One would like to think that Lynas will now put his hand up and admit that it was simplistic nonsense to call the Soil Association’s position simplistic nonsense, given that its view has been sanctified by science. However, I rather doubt he will, since as I suggested a couple of weeks ago his talk had very little to do with actual science, and a lot to do with invoking the word “science” as a kind of religious incantation to justify his views. Meanwhile, various people have been writing interestingly on the questionable scientific case for GM – including Colin Tudge, Brian John, Ford Denison, John Vandermeer, Doug Gurian-Sherman, Eric Holt Giménez and Peter Melchett. Their credentials as scientists may vary, but collectively they’re rather superior to Lynas’s. Unfortunately their views didn’t get as much airplay – perhaps, as a political ‘scientist’, Lynas knows more about how to play the game of politics.

Ultimately, though, I think it’s a grave error to frame this whole debate in terms of “the science”. I was prompted to post on Lynas’s talk because of how blatantly rhetorical his appeal to the concept of “science” was. But as a social scientist like Lynas, I don’t have the biological background always to be able to sort the scientific wheat from the chaff in everything I read about GM. One might think that there should be public institutions employing disinterested scientists to do this on behalf of laymen like me. But that would turn scientists into priests (ironically something of a problem in contemporary society, as demonstrated in Lynas’s lecture) – and many of the questions about GM are not scientific ones anyway.

For example, to ask whether it’s possible to manipulate the rice genome in order to make it synthesise beta-carotene and produce ‘golden rice’ is a scientific question. But to ask whether we should tackle Vitamin A deficiency globally by introducing golden rice is not. Here we might turn to the skills of development experts, anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists and economists – though I’m a bit cautious about the economists, because of their tendency to make their analyses seem more scientific than they actually are. So how about this for a rule of thumb? Any question involving ‘can’ goes to the scientists, because they’re good at figuring out new ways of doing things. Any question involving ‘should’ goes to the anthropologists and sociologists, because they understand how effects ramify throughout societies, and also because it would be good for them to have to make some tricky policy decisions for a change rather than criticising everybody else’s. And any question involving ‘how’ goes to the economists, because they’re good at calculating how to get people to do things using tax incentives and stuff, but otherwise get above themselves. No place in my team for political scientists, but I’m sure Mark Lynas has things to be getting on with.

I mention golden rice in particular because it’s been the subject of a debate between myself and self-styled ‘ecopragmatist’ Graham Stouts. It’s been a bruising affair, the kind of testosterone-fuelled, heavyweight battle witnessed in the lower reaches of the Screwfix Western League on wet winter weekends here in Somerset. I’m not sure that Stouts’ diatribes against me really need to be taken too seriously, but he did cause me to muse over the problematic way the word ‘ideology’ is so often used these days, and the difficulties faced by anyone who questions the modern ideology of ‘progress’, since they immediately invite the charge of backwardness or anti-progressiveness from within that same ideology. The debate also raised questions concerning the practicalities of relieving diseases of poverty.

On the latter score, Stouts considers my views on GM to be “morally repugnant” and akin to “going to Bangladesh, smashing up charitably-donated children’s wheelchairs and demanding they be completely banned”. My feeling about histrionics of this kind amongst GM proponents is that they doth protest too much. And funnily enough the International Rice Research Institute has just issued a press release which rather punctures some of the overinflated claims being put about by GM ideologues proponents on golden rice. A case of the people actually doing the work being rather more modest about it than the camp followers. It was ever thus.

My view remains that when the problem is poverty but the preferred solution is bioengineering Vitamin A into a grain, it’s worth looking very carefully at the political context of the solution. The research I’ve read so far doesn’t suggest to me that golden rice is likely to be the best route to go down even for the palliative relief of Vitamin A deficiency, though I don’t think it should be ruled out entirely. Stouts may be able to clarify his position if he replies to my last posts on his website, but when it comes to the charge of ‘moral repugnance’ my feeling is that GM proponents like him are dishonourably using the emotive issue of children’s suffering to spin their own particular line on GM. I’ll come back to the issue of golden rice in a future post. In the mean time, I guess the lesson I’ve learned from the GM debate is that scientists can’t tell us what to do, so we all have to try to become our own GM experts as best we can. In truth, to quote the inimitable Sweet Brown, ain’t nobody got time for that. But maybe we just have to try.

There was an amusing little sideshow in my debate with Stouts that centred around the Amish. But this post is already too long so I’ll pick up on that next time – not because I particularly want to spin out this GM debate any further, but because the Amish issue links back nicely to last week’s post on R. Ford Denison, and forward to future posts on agrarian populism.

Darwinian Agriculture

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I’ve reviewed R. Ford Denison’s book Darwinian Agriculture in the current issue of Permaculture Magazine (No.75) – the review is also available on this site’s publications page.

I won’t go over the same ground here as in the review – I’ll just make a few observations that I didn’t have space for there. But it’s a cracking book – thoroughly recommended for anyone with an interest in food and farming.

Given that Denison takes on both the biotechnology industry and those he terms ‘self-styled agroecologists’ such as myself, it’s remarkable that his book seems to have received such uniformly positive reviews. I think the reason probably has to do with the quality of his analysis, and the fact that he largely keeps his story focused on the specifics of what the scientific research is telling us – an object lesson for those who seek to justify essentially political stances on the basis of what they call “the science”.

I guess I was already fairly receptive to the critique of what Denison terms ‘the misguided mimicry of nature’ on the basis of my thinking and practice as a permaculture-influenced small-scale grower over a number of years. Several of my posts on this site had been heading in the same direction, but Denison has enabled me to see the issues in much sharper focus from his professional perspective in evolutionary biology. That perspective seems to draw heavily on Richard Dawkins’s rather fundamentalist neo-Darwinism, which normally raises my hackles, but Denison handles it all so deftly that he carries me along. Not so for Timothy Crews, a biologist based at the Land Institute which is much revered among permaculturists. Crews has posted some rebuttals to Denison on the latter’s excellent Darwinian Agriculture blog. Denison has promised a response in turn, and I for one will be watching that debate unfold with interest.

On the subject of permaculture, I don’t personally think that Denison’s analysis necessarily negates too much of what is done in its name (its wilder spiritual reaches excepted perhaps). But it may require us to think more carefully about what we’re doing and why. I hope so, anyway. Equally, I hope some of his criticisms of biotechnology and genetic engineering (or what he entertainingly calls ‘genetic tinkering’) will help to puncture some of the overblown claims that are so often made on its behalf.

I find Denison’s open-mindedness to the range of possible solutions for our agricultural problems refreshing. For example, even though he is in no sense an anti-urban back-to-the-lander, he is willing to contemplate deurbanisation as a response to the difficulties of closing nutrient cycles – a position that many people avoid for fear of being labelled ‘retro-romantic reactionaries’ or some such, as per the kind of diatribes directed at me from some quarters in relation to my previous post. Denison doesn’t oppose urbanisation, but he does recognise that it’s likely to cause difficult long-term problems. If only the ranks of the so called ‘eco-pragmatists’ possessed his degree of pragmatism.

I can’t fault much in Denison’s book, but I’d make a couple of points to put it into a wider context. One emerges from his criticisms of Wes Jackson’s classic paper “The necessary marriage between ecology and agriculture”. Denison’s gloss of Jackson’s argument is that “we can’t understand natural ecosystems, at least not thoroughly, but we should copy them anyway” (p.79). “Does that make sense?” Denison asks. Well, it kind of makes sense to me inasmuch as we clearly don’t fully understand natural ecosystems but we don’t really have any other models of sustainable long-term systems to go by. I suspect that it’s ultimately impossible to create any kind of agriculture that can usefully be regarded as ‘natural’, but the further we depart from it the more we’re flying blind (and also the more input hungry we tend to be). One example is the apparently permanent revolution in nutritional thinking – when I was a kid, the fats in ‘natural’ butter were out and the transfats in synthetic margarine were in, whereas it now seems that that was entirely the wrong way around. The story of pasture-fed versus feedlot beef seems to point in the same direction. So while I think Denison is right to avoid deifying some notion of a perfect ‘nature’ – an all too easy temptation amongst permaculturists – it doesn’t follow that the logic of agricultural nature mimicry is entirely misguided (which isn’t in fact his argument, but it’s a view many seem to adopt).

The second point is that although I’ve praised Denison for sticking to the science, in some ways this gives him an easy ride. He doesn’t commit himself to any particular vision of the agricultural future and he sensibly advocates a bet hedging strategy. The industrial farming lobby rarely even gets as far as acknowledging the merit of bet hedging, at best usually adopting a patronising version of live and let live in its approach to organic, agroecological or small-scale farming – “you get on with your quaint little raised beds or whatever it is you want to do, but leave us to get on with the real business of feeding the world”.

The trouble is, live and let live isn’t how agricultural systems actually work. Anybody trying to operate as a small-scale organic farmer – either for subsistence in poor countries or for cash in rich countries – has to battle almost insurmountable odds to stay afloat, which is why they mostly end up as landless urban slum dwellers in the former case and niche providers of fancy salad leaves in the latter. The charge of organic elitism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So ultimately anybody who thinks there are things about small-scale or agroecological farming that matter must commit themselves to a much larger conflict, which pretty much has to encompass the political and economic shape of the entire globe. Denison takes us on an exhilarating scientific journey, but back on the land there’s a brutal global fight going on for the right to farm at all. That’s no criticism of Denison, because it’s not what his book is about. But if we’re going to preserve much in the way of small-scale, agroecological and family farming in the coming years, even as nothing more than a bet hedging strategy, we’re going to have to put some heavy political brakes on the direction in which global agriculture and urbanisation is currently hurtling. To me, the outlook there is sombre.

Five Reasons Why Mark Lynas Is Wrong About GM Technology

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Mark Lynas has garnered a lot of publicity recently in recanting his opposition to GM crops. He’s joined the growing bandwagon of renegade environmentalists – the so called ‘neo-environmentalists’, who include the likes of Patrick Moore, Steward Brand and James Lovelock – in adopting techno-fixer arguments about the necessity of high tech solutions to the world’s environmental problems.

I’ve read the text of his recent GM speech, and listened to his further defence of his views on the BBC’s ‘Hard Talk‘ programme, and I find his arguments unconvincing and spurious for five main reasons. Most of them turn on the point that the neo-environmentalists would have us believe their views are grounded in something they call “the science” but which on closer inspection turns out be an ideological and rhetorical use of the word “science”, and in fact a rather unscientific one.

And so, the reasons. Number one – Lynas says environmentalists accept the scientific consensus on climate change but ignore it when it comes to GM crops. It’s a false parallel. The science on climate change has shown in the face of much denial that climate change is happening and that it’s anthropogenic. What it hasn’t shown – and what it can’t show – is what, if anything, we should do about it, although it may help to clarify the implications of whatever decisions we take. By contrast, nobody has ever questioned that GM is a viable, implementable technology – the question is whether we should in fact implement it, on which “the science” is equally as impotent in its ability to answer as in the case of climate change. “The science” can address whether GM technologies are safe (probably, but maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty), whether they use more pesticides (yes and no), whether they will eliminate the problem of pests (no) and whether they will increase yields (maybe or maybe not). But it can’t tell us whether we should embrace the technology – though there are certainly plenty of scientists like R. Ford Denison, John Vandermeer, and the signatories to the IAASTD Report who have expressed their doubts – usually in relation to efficacy rather than safety.

Number two – well then, what can tell us? Revealingly, Lynas says he rethought his stance on GM when somebody asked him if he also opposed the wheel on the grounds of corporate control in the automotive industry. Let’s leave the question of corporate control to Point Five and enquire into the rather puzzling comparison Lynas makes between wheels and GM crops. So let’s imagine somebody inventing the wheel – maybe they reckoned it would make it easier for them to tote their harvest home, the invention worked, and the idea caught on. In other words, the invention tackled a specific problem faced by specific people at a specific time. Thousands of years later it’s easy for us to read back into that invention some kind of fateful historical decision that has culminated in our eight-lane highways and all the rest of it. But no such fateful decision was ever made, and the notion that it was is a kind of modern scientistic fallacy that has little to do with actual science. Turning a question of practical science (‘how can I solve this problem’) into a social ideology (‘the scientific solution of problems inherently constitutes social progress and is therefore a good thing’) is nothing more than an act of faith. If we adopt GM it should be because it solves a particular problem, not because it represents ‘progress’. Now, I accept that some people genuinely think GM does solve problems – though I suspect biotechnologists are heavily overrepresented in this particular category (Lynas’s tendency to value their opinion on GM more than anyone else’s seems rather like placing special value on turkeys’ opinions about Christmas in this respect). But if we’re going to implement GM technology, let’s debate exactly which problems it solves, exactly whose problems it solves (who are the winners and losers from its implementation), and whether these prospective solutions are likely to remain stable over time. Maybe, just maybe, cultures that deliberate actively about the paths they wish to take (like the Amish, for example, an easy target for Lynas’s derision) have something to teach cultures like ours that obsess over every new toy in the store.

Number three, to undertake that debate properly requires us to address the politics of the food system, and this is almost wholly absent from Lynas’s analysis. Take his well-worn example of golden rice, a transgenic crop with supplemental Vitamin A which can boost the health of vitamin-deficient poor people and potentially prevent blindness in children. The relevant political question Lynas doesn’t ask is why are these people suffering from Vitamin A deficiency in the first place? Could it be because their income or land access is so attenuated that they can’t afford to grow or buy the fresh vegetables that could otherwise provide the Vitamin A they need? And if so, whose interests are being served by promoting GM rice rather than, say, land reform? As Evan Eisenberg sagely wrote, it’s not the fiascos of biotechnology that we should fear, but its successes.

Number four is a slightly more oblique version of the preceding point. Lynas appears to have no conception of feedback, rebound effects or constrained demand. Like many of his neo-environmentalist chums he desires a world in which people mostly live in cities and have food grown for them with highly intensive, ‘land sparing’ methods, thereby reserving more land for wilderness. The stupidity of this idea really needs a whole book to unpick. One starting point is the need to question whether a ‘land sparing’ agroecosystem of industrial monoculture plus wilderness is in fact ecologically superior to a ‘land sharing’ agroecosystem of small agroecological farms, which is far from a foregone conclusion. Another is to ask why Lynas considers it likely that the urbanised masses he wishes to see will have any interest in preserving the wilderness rather than, say, demanding more meat or biofuels, thereby continuing to push the agricultural frontier into the wilderness. Lynas dismisses as “simplistic nonsense” the Soil Association’s view of an “ideal world in which people in the west eat less meat and fewer calories overall so that people in developing countries can have more”.  Instead he imagines an ideal world in which per hectare crop yields can expand limitlessly in lockstep with increasing demand from populations untethered to any sense of local resource limitation. Simplistic? In a passing moment of lucidity elsewhere in his speech Lynas says “It is not enough to sit back and hope that technological innovation will solve our problems”. Quite.

Number five is where, suddenly, a flicker of political insight does momentarily inflect Lynas’s stentorian voice. His enthusiasm for GM is not, he says, mere apologia for corporate interests, as he’s a supporter of open source GM solutions. This ‘open source GM’ idea seems to be quite a favourite among neo-environmentalists, but a cursory inspection – or even a detailed analysis, perish the thought – of seed industry history gives no support to the narrative of unfolding democratisation and commons rights, and Lynas gives us no reasons to suppose that things will be any different with GM. And to be honest, perhaps that’s for the best. One good reason for concentrating control of seeds – in fact, the only good reason I can think of – is that without it the world of seed sales fills with hucksters, conmen and snake oil merchants. Can you imagine it? Dr Smaje’s magic GM beans – no pests, no fertiliser required, sow them overnight and you too can have a golden goose. Pest refugia? Pah – that’s for losers. Herbicide tolerance in weeds? Let your neighbours worry about it if they want to. Terrifying.

I could go on – I could mention Lynas’s embarrassingly ignorant attack on organic farming, his selective uses of statistics that are every bit as unscientific as those of the anti-GM zealots he excoriates, and so on and so on. But enough is enough. For what it’s worth, I don’t necessarily think that GM crops should never be used. I suspect in the future the whole hoo-hah about GM will be seen as a diversion from the real political issues about the food system, and GM technologies will be seen at best as just another tool in the box, not some kind of global saviour. In the mean time, I’d suggest that any given GM technology should not be used until the key questions have been satisfactorily answered. What problem is this solving? Who will benefit, and who will lose out? How is it likely to pan out in the long term? The answers to those questions will almost certainly prove very much more complex than Mark Lynas would have us believe.

Roe kill reflections

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

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

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

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

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

When is a need an ‘essential need’?

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The average age of market gardeners in the UK is around 60, and currently we import around 70% of the fruit and 40% of the veg that could be grown here. We badly need more people growing more fruit and veg – not just my view, but also that of the Fruit and Vegetables Taskforce commissioned by the previous government. Market gardening – and especially any kind of organic or agroecological market gardening – is much more labour intensive than extensive farming, and it doesn’t pay too well. Throw in the fact that many farmhouses have been sold off as residential units separately from their erstwhile farmlands, and many farm outbuildings have likewise been converted to residential use, and you get a situation where many people are buying small lots of agricultural land for market gardening and attempting to get planning permission from their local authorities in support of their businesses, which is how we started Vallis Veg. Unless you’re born into farming or have considerable independent wealth, it’s virtually the only route into farming or growing for the new farmers that we so badly need.

In order to get planning permission for an agricultural dwelling you have to show that there is an ‘essential need’ for you to be on the holding, which despite the implementation of the new National Planning Policy Framework with its supposed ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ still seems to be being interpreted by planning authorities and planning inspectors under the terms of the old Planning Policy Statement 7, which stipulated that the ‘essential need’ referred to the business, and not the individual. Fair enough perhaps, but planning decisions like this one and this one are adopting such restrictive definitions of ‘essential need’ that even when the need for the farmer to be on site from 6am-10pm is accepted, this is still not regarded as constituting essential need since a long working day is “far from unusual in terms of agricultural working patterns”.

Well, it’s far from unusual if you actually live onsite like most farmers who work such hours do. But who can realistically run a business from 6am-10pm if they live elsewhere – especially when they need to be within sight and sound of the holding to deal with unexpected contingencies? Answer: very few. I tried it and did my best to make it work for over four years before succumbing to the inevitable, at least for now. And again, it’s not just me – the proof of the pudding is in the aforementioned figure that we import up to 60% of our indigenous fruit and vegetables, which we could easily grow ourselves if only the planning system and a few other aspects of food policy were sympathetic rather than actively hostile. Where does the dividing line between ‘personal need’ and ‘essential need’ fall? Judging by the crisis in fruit and vegetable production, somewhere much closer to ‘personal need’ than the planning system is currently allowing.

On 29 January I’m going to the planning inquiry into the appeal of the Ecological Land Coop against refusal of planning permission for three low impact, affordable smallholdings by Mid Devon District Council, where all of these issues will be aired. The result will be a very big deal, because it’s hard to imagine a more thorough, professional and safeguarded proposal than the ELC’s. If their appeal is dismissed, then the stark message is that our policymakers prefer to maintain the existing depopulated rural landscape of agro-industry, underutilised pasture and playgrounds for the wealthy rather than a living, working space for producing the country’s food. I gather that ministers at DEFRA are concerned about over-zealous refusals of planning permission for new farming entrants. I hope they’re keeping a close eye on this appeal, because if it’s dismissed their ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ and Secretary of State Owen Patterson’s commitment to ensure that “businesses should…be free from the unnecessary government red tape that has got in the way of rural economic growth in the past” will be revealed as just more worthless political rhetoric.

Mythologies, and how to apply them

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In its ceaseless search through the blogosphere to identify even the smallest of byte-sized morsels that might inform its mission, Small Farm Future has stumbled upon an alter ego in the shape of Steve Savage’s blog Applied Mythology, which puts the case for agribusiness-as-usual.

I think I can safely say that the editorial office here at Small Farm Future is unanimous in its commitment to evidence-based policymaking, and Savage’s evidence as an industry insider is certainly interesting. I do wonder a little why critics of organic farming and similar initiatives are so vociferous in their condemnations given the overwhelming dominance of large-scale conventional agribusiness in global political opinion – perhaps they’re afraid of something? Nevertheless, it’s good to engage with the other side once in a while.

What’s interesting though is that in these debates matters of technical fact quickly turn into matters of political opinion. For example, Savage purports to show that in relation to greenhouse gas emissions organic wastes are better sent for anaerobic digestion than composted in situ. I don’t think his evidence can entirely support that conclusion, but he may turn out to be right in terms of life-cycle emissions per unit waste. However, such an analysis takes much for granted – and in particular it chooses to focus on one small part of the emissions profile that happens to be strongly associated with organic farming, rather than suggesting any modification to the whole outgassing edifice of our highways, cities, supermarkets, cold chains, soya plantations, airlines, cheap goods from China and all the rest of it. That, of course, is where the politics comes in. And also the ‘myth’, which I take to be a much more complicated and ambiguous word than Savage does – for ultimately both farming in particular and human life in general turn on the stories that we want to tell about ourselves, and how we enact them.

In an article in the Journal of Agrarian Change (‘Beyond industrial agriculture?’ 2010, 10, 3: 437-53), Philip Woodhouse complained about the polarised debates between advocates of “‘small-scale’, labour-intensive ‘peasant’ or ‘family’ farming and large-scale, mechanized ‘industrial’ farming’”. He has a point, but I think the debates are likely to stay polarised until that small-scale, peasant or family farming vision is treated as a serious option in political debate (Woodhouse’s use of scare quotes is quite interesting in that respect). Until that comes to pass, this blog will strive in its own sweetly polarised way to change the world by fronting up to agribusiness. ¡No pasarán!

A small experiment

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I’m planning to start running what I hope will be a long-term experiment in different methods of organic vegetable growing, and I’d like to invite comments on it. If you can suggest ways in which the experiment could be improved, please let me know now before I embark upon it!

I’ve written a brief outline of the experiment under the grand title of the ‘Vallis Veg Small Scale Horticultural Trial’ which is also available on the Research and publications page, so I won’t repeat the details here. The basic point is that in an ideal world it would be nice if each garden plot could produce huge quantities of food, while requiring virtually no human labour or other resource inputs, and with no damage to the soil or the environment.

Back in the real world that’s not so easy to achieve – and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! There are likely to be tradeoffs between various desired goals, and I doubt that there’s any such thing as a perfect growing system that optimises all of them. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that different authorities offer quite a number of variants on the theme of how to maximise fertility inputs while minimising tillage and labour, but there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of convincing data around to evaluate the various claims. This is something that I hope I can help correct with the proposed experiment. If nothing else I ought to get some nice vegetables, improve my fitness through prodigious feats of double-digging, and do my bit to ward off the recession by providing some welcome business for soil testing laboratories. But if you can think of better or different approaches that I should be pursuing, I’d be grateful to hear your thoughts.

Oxford Real Farming Conference: Envisioning Agroecological Futures

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I’ve recently returned from my annual junket to the Oxford Real Farming Conference, which just gets better every year.

At the conference I ran a session entitled Envisioning Agroecological Futures and I promised to write up the ensuing discussion on this blog – a rash promise as it transpires, for not three days after the event many of my copiously scribbled notes now seem entirely unintelligible. Ah, the perils of aging. Anyway, here goes, and apologies if what I say below ignores, belittles or otherwise traduces what anyone had to say. I don’t mean to be offensive – well, not very anyway.

So the premise: supposing the world of small-scale, input light, labour or skills intensive agroecological farming that many of us would like to see actually came into being at some point in the future – what would it look like, and what sorts of tensions and problems would it create? I posed these questions to guide the discussion:

  1. what are the drivers for the emergence of an ‘agroecological society’?
  2. what social, political and economic tensions would emerge in such a society?
  3. what proportion of the population would work directly as farmers?
  4. what kind of surplus could those farmers generate, and what extra-agricultural things would be needed or desired?
  5. who would hold political power, and how could it be limited?
  6. what role would trade play?

In relation to question 5, the previous speaker had mentioned the arresting statistic that 10% of Britain is still owned by Plantagenet families whose ancestors came over with William the Conqueror, a point I used to illustrate the fact that there’s a deep structuring of political power that can be remarkably hard to shift. On reflection, I think that misses a more significant point: it’s not so much that ruling classes are good at clinging on to power over time but that particular kinds of socioeconomic structures (eg. small farm societies) are amenable to particular kinds of enduring power concentration.

Anyway, here’s a quick whizz through some of the resulting discussion:

How would a future small farm society (henceforth SFS) affect gender relations? Would women be confined to the domestic sphere in patriarchal village societies, venerated as Earth Mothers (which amounts to the same thing), or be empowered, successful farmers? I don’t know – though Jonathan Rigg’s book More Than The Soil has some interesting analysis on this. Women play a major economic role in subsistence farm households, but often with the development of cash cropping they become confined to domesticity while the men take over with all those big, fun agricultural toys like tractors.

Talking of big, fun agricultural toys, somebody made the point that diesel engines are hugely efficient compared to human labour, that poverty and famines are associated with non-mechanised subsistence farming, and that smallholders like me in the UK are responsible for depriving African farmers of handy used machinery – which, taken together, constitute possibly the least convincing set of criticisms of small-scale farming that I’ve ever heard. Of course, there are some issues – also raised by others at the session – about the extent to which agroecology currently parasitizes the industrial economy. On the other hand, there are also some issues about the way that the industrial economy parasitizes the global ecology. And if we’re going to use technology most efficiently, then virtually all the world’s fossil fuels and synthetic fertilisers should surely be going to poor peasant farmers on marginal productivity grounds. OK, it won’t happen, but if it did it wouldn’t be the small farmers in the UK who would shout the loudest.  But I think I’ll devote some separate posts to all these knotty issues (and non-issues) soon.

Technological, magic bullet solutions to agricultural problems are enduringly popular…and let’s face it, people in the alternative food movement are (almost) as guilty as the industrial farming brigade of this, what with their compost teas, terra pretas, perennial grain crops and the like. Another suggestion was to use hydroponics to feed the world more efficiently. Basil was mentioned as one suitable crop in this context. Personally I think I’d struggle to eat enough basil to see me through my working day, even though I’m enormously keen on pesto. Others thought we’d be better off using soils to grow staple crops close to consumers. Agreed. But figuring out how small-scale farmers in countries like the UK can realistically grow staple crops in the present economy is a challenge. I mentioned that arable cropping was the final frontier of sustainable farming and that there weren’t too many arable farmers at the conference. Despite catcalls from the floor from a forward-thinking arable farmer commendably in attendance, I still believe that to be true.

Should we care about producing surpluses, or should we focus on wellbeing rather than, say, GDP? I’d say that we should most definitely focus on wellbeing, but that wellbeing is best served if not everybody has to produce their own subsistence. Someone else pointed out that surpluses could be quite useful, mentioning how grateful they were when they were rescued off Snowdon by a Wessex helicopter. But how many Wessex helicopters does a SFS need? How many could it realistically produce? And should agroecologists be climbing Snowdon anyway? More research is needed.

We talked about the problems of the post-war productivist paradigm in British farming, and the lack of any kind of redistributive land ethic in the UK – resulting, in my opinion, from the fact that British socialism has been almost entirely a municipal affair, an achievement of urban working people who escaped or were expelled from rural gentry rule. A few lessons there for a future SFS. It’s a different picture in Latin America, it was pointed out, where leftwing peasant movements abound. Just as well that we shall soon be having a UK branch of Via Campesina, which will hopefully help us to draw on some of that Latin American inspiration. More generally, I think it’s high time we tried to recover the traditions of leftwing peasant populism from the derision it’s suffered at the hands of liberals and Marxists over much of the last century and retool it for future use. Now there’s a subject for another post, not to mention an almighty political struggle.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Others pointed to the many good things that are going on – the Localism Act in the UK, which (might?) empower local communities; circum-Baltic agroecological activism operating at a subcontinental level; the global ecovillage network; futures methodologies available to sharpen up the frankly woeful human capacities for predicting future challenges; and the power of the internet to challenge the onward march of landlordism. Will such developments be enough to protect a small farm society of the future from the depredations of environmental decline, political demagoguery, landed power and chronic, unpredictable risk? Maybe.