Small Farms Solutions: The Kleptogarchy part 26

Small Farms Solution

“Well, I think the answer lies in the soil”, the comedy character Arthur Fallowfield said in response to virtually any question put to him in the BBC radio comedy show Beyond Our Ken, broadcast between 1958 and 1964. The show starred Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams played Arthur Fallowfield, and we listened after lunch on Sunday afternoons. A lot of the jokes were beyond me, but my dad used to laugh out loud, and I remember Arthur Fallowfield. Now I see the line as an elemental truth. No soil, no civilisation. To rescue our civilisation from the catastrophic danger zone, we have to save, improve, replenish our soils, and that requires a movement back to the land, to undertake regenerative farming, in which organic matter in soils is constantly replenished.

Soil is fragile. Rain caused this erosion in Warmwell, Dorset.
Hotter climate, more intense rains, more erosion. Photo by Rodney
Burton, Geograph Project. Creative Commons licence.

We know that small farms are beneficial to countryside communities. In Whose Land Is It Anyway?, published in 1982, Richard Norton-Taylor wrote “Small farms help to prevent rural depopulation, they allow more entrants into farming, they reduce dependence on large and distant companies, absentee landlords”. He drew attention to government neglect of small farms, pointing out that “British policy-makers equate size, that is to say, bigness, with efficiency”. Despite the policies of ‘big is best’, he suggested that many farmers on expanded acreages “are trapped in a vicious circle: the higher their costs, the more they try to produce; but they are encouraged to believe that the surest way to produce more, so as to cover their costs, is to rely more on (increasingly expensive) chemicals and machines”, while “the long-term interest and health of the land and soil is pushed well into the background”.[1] It was not fashionable in the early 1980s to write about organic farming – farming without manufactured synthetic agrochemicals — but Richard Norton-Taylor quoted a 1981 US Department of Agriculture report on organic farms, which found that they were almost two and a half times more productive than ‘conventional’ farms, per unit of energy consumed.[2]

Chris Smaje’s 2020 book A Small Farm Future makes a powerful case for resettling the countryside, although there is still a widespread view that rural landscapes should be ‘protected’ from development. By 2050, Chris Smaje proposes, home gardeners will be producing potatoes, other vegetables, fruit and eggs for themselves, their families and friends, on 90% of the total garden acreage. A similarly high proportion of green spaces in towns and cities will be given over to horticultural produce plus pork. Market gardens would cover twice their current area, and feature some livestock for manure. Slightly larger smallholdings would grow some cereals and produce organic beef and dairy products. Mixed farms of around 40 acres – a common size before the Industrial Revolution – would also grow field-scale vegetables and fibre crops. Existing rough grazing would be rewilded, there would be some larger specialist farms, especially for dairy products, and to a large extent people’s labour would replace carbon-intensive inputs.[3] 

The great barrier restricting this vision is the price of land, out of all proportion to the value of the produce from it. Land is a financial asset, a means to gain privacy, a status symbol, a cultural repository, a theatre for field sports, a space for military manoeuvres, a mantle over minerals, a landscape for leisure. If society should collapse, land gains even more significance. If there is an economic boom, ditto. Land with a house, or permission for a house, becomes a development site and vastly more expensive still. Farms have been beyond the pockets of most new entrants for decades, and now housing is following suit. In England, 65% of households owned or were buying a home in 2019-20, compared with 71% in 2003-04, and among those aged 25-34, the ownership rate slumped from 59% in 2003-04 to 41% in 2019-20, an average drop of just over one percentage point for every year.[4]

How can land become affordable to people who want to farm it and often live on it too? If there were a dramatic fall in world population, pressure on land would diminish. This happened in England after the Black Death of 1347-1350. The plague deaths led to labour shortages and better conditions for peasants. Historian Paul Slack explained:

“After climbing from height to height, life abandoned the far mountains and sank back to the plain. There was a change in the conditions of existence too. Plague and famine had struck unevenly: more of the poor died than of the rich. More died in towns than in the countryside. This led to a different kind of migration than had occurred in the centuries of expansion. Countrymen moved to towns to fill the gaps left by the plague, though the overall population of towns remained less than it had been. Peasants moved from bad land to good.”[5]

Paul Slack noted that, after the chaos of the plague years:

“All over Europe the wages of the labourer rose. As the pressure of overpopulation decreased, and as cultivation became concentrated on the better lands, so the amount of food per head increased. The price of corn fell and poor men were able to improve their standards, from rye to wheat, and from wheat to meat.”[6]

Deaths improved the living standards of the survivors. When there is less competition for land, the price falls. The process of depopulation is often fatal, literally. As John Michael Greer highlights[7] in The Ecotechnic Future:

“A basic fact of our predicament is the hard reality that today’s human population is fat larger than the world’s carrying capacity. What William Catton[8] called ‘ghost acreage’ – the vast boost to subsistence that fossil fuels give to growing, storing and distributing food – has allowed the world’s human population in the last few centuries to balloon to disastrously high levels. As the industrial age ends, the surpluses of food and other resources and the infrastructure of public health that supported this expansion will end as well, with predictable impacts on the size of the human population.”

The theft of finite resources, and the widespread refusal of corporations and governments to cover the costs of the dangerous externalities which they have deliberately omitted from their balance sheets, have swollen the klepto-system to such a size that it threatens, in decades rather than centuries, to annihilate swathes of the world’s soils, fresh water, floras and fauna, including our not-so-clever selves.

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[1] From pages 113 and 114 of Whose Land Is It anyway? by Richard Norton-Taylor, published by Turnstone Press, 1982. Mr Norton-Taylor wrote for The Guardian from 1975 to 2016 and in 2021 was an investigative journalist for Declassified UK.

[2] Ibid page 190.

[3] A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje, published by Chelsea Green, 2020, from Table 11.1, alternative agriculture Britain 2050 – land use, inputs and products.

[4] ‘Extending Home Ownership: Government Initiatives’, House of Commons Library, March 30^th 2021, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03668/, accessed June 13^th 2022.

[5] From ‘Population Crisis’ by Paul Slack in History of the English Speaking Peoples Vol.5 p.713, expanded from the text by Sir Winston Churchill, edited by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Hugh Trevor-Roper and AJP Taylor. BPC Publishing, 1969 and 1971. Paul Slack (1943- ) was Professor of Early Modern Social History at Oxford University, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The Ecotechnic Future p.41, in chapter 3, A Short History of the Future.

[8] William R Catton Jr (1926-2015) was Professor of Sociology at Washington State University. His books included Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980), and Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse (2009).

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