Crop Stealers
Posted: October 18, 2022 Filed under: Agriculture, Climate Leave a commentSunday August 19th 2035
Have been busy making tomato chutney, which I like with cider vinegar but that is hard to get hold of. My nephew Alun over near Aberdan planted an orchard of apple trees a dozen years ago, and they are starting to crop well now, so I will ask him if he can spare me some for a batch of cider vinegar. I can give him broad beans in return, definitely my favourite vegetable, and a legume too, good for the soil. Even small children now learn that legumes and soil bacteria called rhizobia have a symbiotic relationship – within nodules on the roots, the rhizobia convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into nitrogen available for plant nutrition. Twenty years ago the public didn’t think about soil fertility that much. Manufactured fertilisers were still affordable, just about, but we need to grow differently now, and it demands much more skill. I am not sufficiently skilful. We have just enough food to survive. I always over-plant because you never know what will grow and what will be destroyed, by weather that has forgotten seasonal good behaviour, and by our competitors like slugs. Crops are stolen, too, have been for the past five years or so. Lyn and Sian down the lane give meals to a rota of village children in return for crop watching. Even five years ago we still used security cameras but the electricity supply became less and less reliable and also more expensive. We had a camera powered by rechargeable lithium batteries but when they eventually gave out we didn’t replace them because we have more urgent uses for our scarce electricity. Maybe I’ll try a solar-powered camera, but it’s bound to be intermittent.
There was talk of a village hydro-electric plant, powered from the Crychydd river, but it dries up every summer now. It would be OK in winter, perhaps we could resurrect the plan, but people are so tired. I wonder how many of today’s children will live as long as me? I was born just before the foundation of the old National Health Service, but that’s all been privatised and you only receive treatment if you have the money to pay, or have the luck to be accepted as a charity case. Here in Wales there is a long tradition of self-medication, just think of the Physicians of Myddfai, and the Herbalists of Cwrt y Cadno, and yes I do grow herbs with medicinal value, but as an amateur. Evening primroses and great mullein would take over the garden if I Iet them, above a carpet of wild strawberries. I make mullein tea for coughs and evening primrose oil for dry skin and eczema. Looking back as I can to the 1960s I wonder at the optimism then, at the confidence of eternal progress. I’ve still got some tomes from university days, one of which is Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth[1]…. I’ve just fetched it from the walnut Regency bookcase that grandad Henry gave me when I was about seven. (Stupidly I took off and lost its glass door, because I didn’t want the books hidden behind it.) There are 1,194 pages in this 1956 volume, published by University of Chicago Press. Chapters include ‘Possible limits of raw-material consumption’ and ‘Limitations to energy use’. I have turned to ‘Limitations to energy use’, by Charles A Scarlott, who was enthusiastic about nuclear power, about “the possibility that the nuclear-fusion reaction can be made a controlled energy source. The amounts of energy such a reaction would make possible are almost incomprehensible”. Mr Scarlott, then a technical information manager in the public relations department at Stanford Research Institute in California, admitted some concerns – “The facts about our energy resources are sobering. The rapidity with which we are finding ways of spending that energy, often without realizing it, is shocking” – but was not worried because of his “infinite confidence, supported by a long record of the past, that man’s ingenuity is equal to the task”. In terms of techniques of exploiting energy sources, that may have been true, but he did not even mention climate change.
The preceding chapter, ‘Possible limits of raw-material consumption’ by Samuel H Ordway Jr, a leading conservationist in the mid 20th century, was more cautious. Mr Ordway wrote that if industries carry on expanding, there would come “an enforced, unexpected reversal of a faith”. He advised using the next 60 years – 1956 to 2016 – “to face up to the problem of how to save prosperity”. He thought that in an increasingly prosperous society, people would work less and have more time to devote to saving civilisation, but that did not happen on anything like the scale required. Instead of spreading prosperity, the big bosses kept more and more for themselves and kept wages too low for the nose-to-grindstone masses to have time to save the world.
“If men recognize today the danger ahead from continuing overconsumption of resources and basic lack of human sympathy with nature, they will seek remedies”, wrote Mr Ordway (it was all men, men, men in those days). By and large men did not seek remedies with anything like the urgency required. So Mr Scarlott was over-confident in the power of technology, and Mr Ordway was over-confident about the capacity of people to act in the long-term interests of the planet and therefore of themselves too.
Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth reflects male and predominately American culture. Only one of over 70 authors was a woman, Dr Edavaleth K Janaki Ammal, from India, writing about subsistence agriculture in the recently independent former British colony. In the middle of the 20th century women’s voices became louder. I think of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Vandana Shiva’s campaigns for seed sovereignty and regenerative farming, Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric decision making in and between communities, Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics – keep inside the doughnut for sustainability and avoid the dangerous black space of excess growth – and of course the climate activist Greta Thunberg. They are all from ‘democracies’ which no matter how flawed allow greater freedom of expression and dissent than in autocratic states with tight central control.
It’s true that autocratic states were in the ascendant until the exorbitant costs of climate breakdown led to the fraying of control systems, first at the margins then accelerating towards the centres. Technologies of control still exist, but it’s too costly to have them everywhere.
[1] Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, edited by William L Thomas Jr, University of Chicago Press, 1956. Published for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation.
Small Farms Solutions: The Kleptogarchy part 26
Posted: September 21, 2022 Filed under: Agriculture, Population | Tags: Chris Smaje, Paul Slack, Richard Norton-Taylor, small farms Leave a commentSmall 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.
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.
[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 30th 2021, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03668/, accessed June 13th 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).
Wanted: Powerful Persuasion for One Planet Developments
Posted: March 15, 2021 Filed under: Agriculture, Low-impact living, Planning | Tags: Carmarthenshire, One Planet Developments Leave a comment
by PDR
One Planet Developments (OPDs) were a great idea of the Labour-Plaid governments in Wales between 2007 and 2011. The plan was to enable people of modest means to buy land at its agricultural value, then submit an application to live and work on it. The caveats were and are huge, a whole racecourse of high hurdles to clear before being allowed to do anything at all, in the interests of a way of living that is sustainable within the resources of our one, small, planet. That is surely a laudable and very necessary aim, given that the UK, including Wales, is consuming Earth’s resources at nearly four times the sustainable rate. (See www.footprintnetwork.org for much more information.)
In the decade since 2010, when the Welsh Government published the criteria for OPDs in Technical Advice Note (TAN) 6, around three dozen One Planet Developments have received planning permission. They are essentially smallholdings, and their total area is unlikely much to exceed that of a single 400-acre dairy farm. Yet despite their tiny footprint on the land of Wales, there is powerful opposition to them from multiple quarters: from within local authorities, from people living near application sites, from commentators who see incomers as threats to existing communities. The fuss is out of all proportion to their scale.
To succeed, people who sink their resources into an OPD have to work like Trojans, count everything – all their inputs, all their outputs – to set against their calculations in their initial mandatory Management Plan, build their own house while they work, generate their own power, improve the soil and raise its fertility. As well as subsistence crops, they need to make enough money from their land to pay essentials like council tax. If they don’t achieve the prescribed level of self-sufficiency within five years, their planning permission can be revoked.
If people buy land, improve it, meet the conditions to build a home on it, but then experience a major change in circumstances, such as long-term debilitating illness or injury that prevents them from working on the land, then they can sell to someone else who is willing to take on the same restrictions. We live in a capitalist society where profit is the name of the game, so it shouldn’t be a shock if an OPD goes on sale at an open-market smallholding price. After all, the OPD is likely to be in countryside with great views, and a unique, highly energy efficient home.
Under current conditions, the chances of the OPD experiment persisting for more than a generation seem slight. Smallholdings will be sold on the open market as their owners age, become infirm, or cannot produce the specified minimum of 65% of their basic needs from their land. There are no signs that it is becoming easier to obtain planning permission, in fact the opposite. In March 2021, Carmarthenshire County Council’s Planning Department refused permission to Neil Moyse and Kelly Mitchell, experienced gardeners, for an OPD market garden near Meidrim, west of Carmarthen, on land sloping down to the Afon Cynin and containing a pond. The reason for refusal included this:
“The proposal is not supported by sufficient information to demonstrate that the development would meet the One Planet Development criteria. Planning Policy Wales defines One Planet Development as development that, through its low impact, either enhances or does not significantly diminish environmental quality. The suitability of the site was questioned at pre-application stage and those concerns for the development of an OPD in this location are sustained. For this reason the proposal constitutes an unjustified form of development in a countryside location.”
All rather vague. In fact and in contrast, Natural Resources Wales said: “We have no objection to the proposed development as submitted and provide the following advice” [listed in the consultation response]. The Planning Ecologist detailed work to be undertaken for the development to proceed. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Dai Davies, wrote:
“I have, over the last 15 years, served on various Welsh Government panels and boards concerned with economic development and regeneration. As a consequence I have developed a keen interest in localised supply chains and the principles of the foundation economy which is now being championed in government.
“I have known the two applicants for the last three years during which time they have helped and advised me on the creation of a woodland garden and wildflower meadow at my home. They are impressively knowledgeable and hard working and are already making a success of their niche horticultural business.”
There were several other letters of support, including from Somerset organic market gardening guru Charles Dowding. But there were also objections from local people worried about consequences such as possible traffic, construction of buildings on the site, and whether the applicant would run out of money, which in the end had greater influence over the decision. These worries could apply to virtually any development, and if they are going to win out, it means that new OPDs will be rarer than hens’ teeth.
If that happens, we lose valuable exemplars of how to live lightly on the land.
Welsh Government Plans for Future Agricultural Support are a Huge Challenge for Rural Communities
Posted: December 16, 2020 Filed under: Agriculture, Finance | Tags: Agriculture (Wales) White Paper, Welsh Government Leave a commentThe Welsh Government’s new White Paper on agriculture post-Brexit is strong on ideals for farming to deliver ‘public goods’ in the form of benefits such as cleaner air, vegetation to delay water run-off and store carbon, higher water quality, more biodiversity, and improved soil quality.
According to the Agriculture (Wales) White Paper published on December 16th, there will be no continuation of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), which subsidises farms according to their size in qualifying hectares (one hectare is 2.47 acres). Welsh farmers are heavily dependent on the BPS. The Welsh Government’s own data (Farm Incomes in Wales, April 2018 to March 2019, published in December 2019) shows that annually around 20% of farms are making an overall loss even with subsidies, and over half would make a loss without subsidy and diversification – over 60% in 2018-19, the most recent year for which data is available.
As yet there is no clear information on the amounts to be invested in the proposed new Sustainable Farming Scheme, to replace the existing system – which can remain broadly in place (but with less cash) until the end of 2024, five years after Brexit – and the Welsh Government admits there is still much work to do on the structure, mechanics and future evaluation of the new support system. The plan is to introduce the Agriculture Bill, detailing the Sustainable Farming Scheme, in summer 2022.
Welsh agriculture and rural communities have benefited from about £337 million a year in support from the European Union. That is equivalent to £6,370 for each of the 52,900 farmers and farm workers in Wales. The subsidies have been life support for Welsh farming. There is as yet no clue whether the Welsh Government will replicate this level of funding. If the budget is lower, it is arguable that the 20% of farmers who make a loss despite receiving subsidies, and many of the additional 40% who need subsidies and non-farming income streams to break even, would risk severe financial distress trying to reorient their businesses quickly to the desired sustainability model.
The Welsh Government’s aims include increasing tree cover, raising production of arable crops, fruit and vegetables, improving soils, habitats, and biological diversity, and strengthening local supply chains so that more Welsh produce finds its way to Welsh consumers. Other priorities include protecting Welsh language and culture. More than four in 10, 43%, of people living and working on farms in Wales are Welsh-speaking, a higher proportion than in any other occupation, and therefore severe financial distress in rural communities would imperil the language.
The aim of public money for the public benefit of a cleaner, healthier environment is logical and necessary, but food needs to be central to the mission too. The White Paper suggests that taking produce off the market, in the case of exceptional volatility or glut, would be the method of supporting food production. This ‘intervention’ is a standard EU practice and is unlikely to compensate for the loss of basic payments.
The White Paper also proposes a reduction in the complexity of regulation, with the creation of one set of minimum standards, including for animal health and welfare; substantial changes to the enforcement of regulations to make penalties more proportionate to the misdemeanour, and a switch from criminal to civil proceedings for offenders outside the BPS, who have been treated differently from those in receipt of EU funds. Monitoring of compliance would be ongoing, making maximum use of data from satellites, and barriers to data sharing would need to be removed (perhaps raising concerns about privacy). There would be a new dispute resolution scheme for farmers with tenancies under the Agricultural Holding Act 1986, whose landlords might not agree to actions required to qualify for support under the Sustainable Farming Scheme.
Advice would be a big part of the new world for farmers. There would be an initial sustainability assessment for every applicant for support, and then advice on how to provide the improvements needed for greater resilience to climate change and other environmental emergencies such as soil erosion and degradation. That’s a large requirement for advice, but not yet guidance on who is going to provide it, and at what cost to the public purse.
The environmental aims of the White Paper are very welcome, but such a rapid reshaping of financial support for agriculture is a huge challenge facing both Wales’ farmers and the bureaucracies that will have to help them leap over the new hurdles.
Here is a link to the full White Paper. The consultation on it closes at 23.59 on March 25th 2021.
PDR
Wales Clobbered by Westminster’s Cuts in Farming Support Cash
Posted: November 30, 2020 Filed under: Agriculture, Politics | Tags: Brexit, Community supported agriculture, Farm subsidies, Local supply chains 1 CommentA horrible suspicion has rooted in my mind that the agricultural rationale for Brexit was to make the UK, including Wales, dependent on ‘food’ from the USA.
Who really wants chicken doused with chlorine? Cereals containing residues of the herbicide glyphosate (i.e. Roundup)? Foods containing antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides? Not many people would freely choose these, I guess. Farmers use them to cut costs (in the short term, just don’t think about long-term damage to habitats and ecological diversity!) so they can ‘compete’ for sales to the big food processors and retailers. It’s the scruffy back door of capitalism, where the rubbish bins are, and through which food is offered to the public at prices affordable to those on low wages, the low wages that enable the owners of the system to shovel more and more money into their private possessions and to influence, control, politics.
This year I have been struck by news pictures from the USA, showing colossal queues of motorists waiting for groceries from food banks. They don’t appear able to afford even cheapened ‘food’. Why are they driving cars then? you may ask. The USA’s widely spaced suburbs mean that without vehicles, residents would not be able to access work, shops, or anything much else apart from their immediate neighbours. And of course petrol is ludicrously cheap there, about 50p a litre at the pumps in 2020, cheaper than milk at about 54p a litre.
Economies collapse when populations are so impoverished that they lack ‘effective demand’. Before the Civil War in the USA, the rebel states wanting to keep slavery were handicapped by complexes of superiority, and by weak economies resulting from slaves’ lack of resources to demand anything at all. Before the war, in 1857, Hinton Rowan Helper laid all this out in his The Impending Crisis of the South (available as a e-book from the excellent Project Gutenberg).
We may no longer accept slavery, but in the USA and the UK we live in unequal societies, where food banks have become essential for those with low and uncertain incomes. That’s the inevitable result of cut, cut, cut.
Now this philosophy is clobbering the UK’s farmers as they face the UK’s exit from the European Union. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy was designed to protect small farms so they could continue to produce high quality food, and form large enough populations for essential services to remain in rural areas.
Looking specifically at Wales, which has 9% of the UK’s land but 18% of its permanent pasture and 28% of its sheep, the draconian cuts in farm support, revealed in Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Spending Review on November 25th, seem destined to lead to bankruptcies. A no-deal Brexit would impose tariffs of 12.8% plus significant amounts per 100 kilos ranging from €167.50 to €311.80, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB). About 32% of lamb from Wales is exported to the EU, much of it from farms kept operational only with subsidy support. As subsidies are cut, and the cost of exporting rises, farmers are caught between a rock and a very hard place.
The Farmers’ Union of Wales calculates that for 2021-22, the budget for farm support and rural development will be £242 million compared with the £337 million that the Westminster government had previously promised. This is a cut of 28.2%.
The Welsh Government’s release ‘Farm Incomes in Wales, April 2018 to March 2019’ reported that “In each year around 20 per cent of the farms are making an overall loss with a subsidy, and over half would make a loss without subsidy and diversification”. When farmers receive less financial support and have to pay new painful tariffs on exports to the EU, how long are banks going to remain sympathetic?
The Farmers’ Union of Wales president, Glyn Roberts, says: “Direct payments [mainly for each hectare of a farm business] make up around 80% of average Welsh farm incomes. The significant impacts such a cut in funding will have on Welsh farms, agricultural businesses and rural communities are clear, and these will come at a time when the industry is already anticipating major problems due to non-tariff barriers, unfair competition from sub-standard imports and the possibility of massive EU tariff barriers in the event of a no-deal Brexit.”
Wales has 5% of the UK’s population but 10% of the farmland and 16% of the farms. Farming communities are the backbone of Welsh language and culture, which Westminster’s wrecking ball would weaken, perhaps fatally.
Upland Wales, already a water store for English cities, suffered from the blanket planting of non-native conifers, especially in the 1960s and 70s, resulting in damaging habitat loss and in acidification. Maybe the Westminster government is thinking of Wales as a source of water, timber, and wind- and water-power for England – if so, rather an extractive colonial mindset.
The Chancellor’s swingeing attack on farmers in Wales does not allow much time for adaptation, but that could be part of the plan. To fight back, farmers need to sell direct, or at the very least shorten supply chains so that they can keep a higher proportion of the end selling price.
New mixed family farms, often small and prioritising soil improvement and rich habitats, are also part of the answer, a topic to which Chris Smaje has devoted one new book, and Colin Tudge is devoting another. If mixed family-run farms are part of community supported agriculture, like the Caerhys scheme in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, farmers are helped to stay on the land and communities have a source of fresh food, in both cases improving their resilience — and their independence from unreliable politicians. If money circulates within communities, instead of leaving for the City of London and probably a variety of tax havens, local demand is also protected.
PDR
Chris Smaje’s book is A Small Farm Future, published by Chelse Green in 2020.Colin Tudge’s book is The Great Rethink: a 21st Century Renaissance, to come from Pari Publishing in January 2021.
EU Parliament Drags Feet on Agriculture Policy Reform
Posted: November 11, 2020 Filed under: Agriculture, Finance | Tags: Common Agricultural Policy, European Parliament, Greenpeace Leave a comment
Conflict within the European Union over the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reveals stark differences between ‘business as usual’ members of the European Parliament, and those wanting support to focus on small farmers, the environment and climate change.
“So what?” may be a UK response, given the UK’s departure from the Union, but similar tensions are likely to be felt in the countries of the UK too.
The three largest groups in the European Parliament are the European Peoples Party (EPP) with 187 of the 705 members, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) with 147, and Renew Europe with 108, totalling 442 or 63% of all the seats. The EPP is conservative, S&D is described as centre left, and Renew Europe is centrist, so together they cover a wide spectrum of opinion. Late in October they pushed through the European Commission’s plans for 2021-2027, which show little change from the current arrangements, and not nearly enough to enthuse Green politicians or environmental groups.
The Greens/European Free Alliance (67 seats) and the group including the Nordic Green Left (39 seats) were not numerous enough to influence the result.
The plans of the Commission – essentially the EU’s civil service – included a redistribution of payments per acre to give more to small and medium-sized farms, a minimum of 2% of support payments to go to young farmers, and restriction of support to ‘genuine farmers’. The proposals also included better protection for wetlands, encouragement for crop rotations to benefit soils, and more money for on-farm eco-schemes. The intended budget for 2021-2027 is €386.646 billion, split €291.091 billion for ‘Pillar 1’ and the balance for ‘Pillar 2’. Pillar 1, direct payments to farmers based on the area of their holdings, is 3.8% more than for 2014-2020. Pillar 2 is for rural development and environmental improvements, which in 2014-2020 received €95.078 billion, but for 2021-2027 is expected to receive €95.555 billion, barely an increase even at current prices (which ignore the impact of inflation).
Moves to bolster environmental schemes are too cautious, according to environmentalists. Thirty per cent of direct payments and 35% of rural development spending will require environmental justification, in the latter case up from 30%, but this means 70% of direct payments will be unaffected by any eco concerns, as will 65% of rural development expenditure.
Big farmers are the main beneficiaries of the CAP. Almost one third of payments go to 125,000 farm holdings, just 2% of the six million recipients. The 125,000 holdings each mop up over €50,000 a year. The 2021-2027 package is likely to impose a ceiling of €100,000 per holding, but the overall distribution is not expected to alter as much as small farmers would wish. The minimum size to qualify for any payment is up to the member states, but five hectares is a popular level, and has applied in the UK. This excludes many horticultural and start-up holdings.
Greenpeace complained that the new deal would be a “death sentence for small farms and nature” and billions of Euros of public money “will drive farming further into climate catastrophe”.
“The proposed common agricultural policy makes no effort to limit spending on industrial animal farming, and would prohibit national governments from introducing higher environmental standards that farmers in their country would have to meet to get public subsidies. The plan would scale down current requirements to leave space for nature on land farmed or to protect carbon-rich peatlands and grasslands,” worried Greenpeace, adding “The proposal would also set maximum national spending limits on some environmental programmes.”
Greenpeace would like the proposals withdrawn, and replaced by a new set focused on environmental improvement and climate change mitigation. But given the EU Parliament’s backing for the current agenda, significant change is not on the horizon.
See: http://capreform.eu/agriculture-in-the-european-green-deal-from-ambition-to-action/, 21st October 2020
www.greenpeace.org, ‘EU Parliament signs death sentence for small farms and nature, Greenpeace’, 20th October 2020, and ‘EU Commission must withdraw farm plan after Parliament failure, says Greenpeace’, 23rd October 2020
https://ec.europa.eu, ‘Future of the common agricultural policy’, accessed 26th October 2020
PDR
Small Farms Retrieved from the Past
Posted: November 5, 2020 Filed under: Agriculture, Society | Tags: John Seymour, Retrieved from the Future, small farms 1 CommentTwo new books, one by Colin Tudge and one by Chris Smaje, reviewed here and here, advocate regenerative agriculture on lots more small farms across the UK, indeed across the world. A quarter of a century ago, John Seymour wrote a novel called Retrieved from the Future in which he made very similar arguments.
John Seymour, the self-sufficiency guru and author of Self Sufficiency and The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency among more than three dozen other books, set Retrieved from the Future in an unidentified year of the 21st century, quite early in the century because some characters remembered World War II. There has just been a disaster called the CRASH, triggered by jihadis destroying the oil wells of the Arabian Gulf. Very little oil was getting through. Bob Hurlock, a character with a great deal in common with John Seymour himself, writes:
“In December of 20__ we had a Conservative government in England and all the usual things were happening – strikes, bankruptcies, thousands being flung out of work and the inner cities decaying. Plenty of crime and all that and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. It was obvious – to me at least – that the whole thing was due for collapse anyway. And it was the coldest winter I’d seen in my lifetime and that made it all a lot worse”. (Ch.1 p.6)
The story is set on the Suffolk coast, an area familiar to John Seymour, who also wrote The Companion Guide to East Anglia, and was himself a nautical man familiar with sailing boats. Despite describing the hardships of lives suddenly without oil, and without all the conveniences made possible by oil, the novel does not mention climate change or the surveillance state in which we now all live. When John Seymour was writing the book in the years/months before publication in 1996, mobile telephony was very young. The world’s first text message was sent only in December 1992, and large brick-like portable phones were beginning to be used in businesses, but were still out of the ordinary. As for surveillance, cameras recording the movements of people have, like other monitoring paraphernalia, mushroomed since 2000, the year of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which might also be called the Rollout of Investigatory Powers Act. Consideration of climate change was mainly under the radar. The United Nations Framework Convention was signed in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, but the issue only gradually, slowly, edged into public consciousness.
So when John Seymour was imagining Retrieved from the Future, the violence he thought would follow the last days of oil was between a demoralised Army, and guerrilla groups carrying old-fashioned firearms on foot and bicycles, cutting telephone wires and taking cover in pine forests. It was not remote-controlled Death by Drone. In fact, drones do not have a role in the book although they have been common in military operations since the early 1980s.
The point is that, due to weather instability and climatic deterioration, and easier ways of controlling and killing people remotely, building new ways of life after some colossal shock will be even more difficult now than John Seymour assumed in the book.
In his little republic of Gretford, somewhere imaginary between Felixtowe and Southwold, extractive monoculture farming by corporations – his was ‘London Farming’ — quickly fails for lack of fuel for farm machinery, for lack of agrochemicals derived from and manufactured using oil, for lack of veterinary treatments for the over-intensively housed livestock. In this complete breakdown, organic farmer Bob Hurlock and his elected government redistribute the land to new small farmers, who at first have to labour on meagrely-fed stomachs to prepare and plant their land, while also regenerating the meagrely-fed soil with seaweed or leaf mould, any source of carbon and nutrients they can find. Trade by sailing barge replaces trade overland, which is fine for a coastal district but not so great for a city like Birmingham, base in the book for the army that tried, but eventually failed, to seize and hold power.
As for Wales (where I live, and where John Seymour lived for many years), the nation declares itself independent and areas of England west of the Dee and the Severn ask to join.
It is a hopeful story in the end. Bob Hurlock says:
“As the year wore on, we found that we could spare children from the fields, and they began to go to school again. Sam Packard, our Minister of Education, helped and advised by various people who were interested, devised a completely new system of teaching children. They were not so much taught, as helped to read and write and do arithmetic, but their education was based on handicrafts, arts, agriculture. The aim was that every child should leave school with at least a working knowledge of all the crafts that were worth practising, and of agriculture and stockmanship, but also with a first-class knowledge of one chosen craft. Our aim – the ideal for which we were to strive – was the educated peasant-craftsman.” (Ch.23 p.224)
’Peasant’ is used here as a term of respect for a self-sufficient person who has mastered several skills, and it can of course apply to men and women. But in the book there is only one major woman character, Bob’s wife Jessie, and the women’s work is largely cooking, gardening and the Arts, which is fine as far as it goes, but places the author firmly in the 20th century, in which he lived for all but four years, dying aged 90 in 2004. But his take on soil improvement, habitat diversity, mixed farming, and people working their own land, is in tune with Colin Tudge and Chris Smaje. Oil-based farming is the temporary aberration, and restorative farming should – will, if we are sensible – become the standard to which we aspire. We will have to turn the planning and financial systems on their heads to allow new small farms on land valued according to its productive capacity and not its notional capital price, and these are alien ideas to many, at least unless and until we experience a CRASH shock.
And now the disappearance of oil is just one of the tsunami events facing us. The longer we take to change, the harder it will be.
Retrieved from the Future sets out John Seymour’s philosophy in an entertaining and thought-provoking way, and as a bonus contains sections written in Suffolk dialect, heard much less often now that the countryside has emptied of people who worked in it. Published in 1996 by New European Publications Ltd, ISBN 1-872410-05-7, paperback, 235 pages.
A Small Farm Future: Just a Pipe Dream?
Posted: October 29, 2020 Filed under: Agriculture, Rural Economy | Tags: A Small Farm Future, Chris Smaje, Land reform, Usufruct 2 CommentsWe need up to 10 times more farmers in the UK than we have right now, biologist Colin Tudge proposes in his forthcoming book, The Great Rethink: a 21st Century Renaissance.
Farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje, whose book A Small Farm Future was first released in October 2020, argues that in a disturbed, resource-constrained world, with powerful states unravelling from the centre, it is only by farming for self-sufficiency that swathes of the population will be able to survive with a degree of dignity and the hope of persistence.
Chris Smaje, who farms in Somerset, England, is in favour of localism over today’s long global supply chains, of diverse mixed farming systems over monocultures dependent on synthetic chemical inputs, and of collaboration over dog-eat-dog competition. He makes very similar proposals to Colin Tudge, and both see clearly the elephant in the room — land as a store of capital value unrelated to the value of output from it.
For Chris Smaje, possible solutions include heavy gift and inheritance taxes, to prevent land from being passed on from parents to children. He realises that for this to work, the children would have to be supremely confident that they too, and future generations, would have access to land. Colossal estate taxes have a spiky downside in that they can discourage farmers from thinking long-term. The Usufruct system of land tenure, in which land is inheritable as long as it is well managed, lacks the disadvantage (for the farmer) of colossal tax liability, but Chris Smaje does not back it strongly because the land right is conditional upon the judgement of someone else. Yet Usufruct has worked well in Cuba, and works to stabilise the social structure by keeping multi-generational families together.
The family or kin group is the default for humans. It’s understandable that today’s farmers mostly want to keep their holdings intact, and to enlarge them should the opportunity arise, often because of the wish to provide for one’s children. In the UK there are no broad sweeps of uncultivated land available for new farmers. The ‘utilised agricultural area’ is 72% of the total land area, and the scope for expanding it is small unless cities, towns and suburbs are Cubanised, with parks and open spaces given over to fruit and vegetable production.
So where is land for new farmers to come from? There would have to be a degree of dispossession, if existing farmers chose not to sell / lease / share some of their land. Chris Smaje suggests that taxes could result in dispossession. He also thinks that interacting climate / soil /population / capital and other crises – he considers 10 – would work against land as a repository of capital value. If we think of population, for example, in the mid-14th century in England the population crash caused by the Black Death increased the bargaining power of those labouring poor who survived, and their economic situation improved, if temporarily.
Even if land were shared out, the acquisitive souls labelled ‘big men’ by Chris Smaje would soon be plotting to gain control over it. That has not happened in Cuba, a much-studied example of land redistribution, but Cuba’s population pressure is lower, 103 persons per square kilometre, compared with 429 in England. The Cubans most hostile to the 1959 revolution mostly left for Florida (and unlike other Latin American migrants, were warmly welcomed in the US). The state farms that replaced the estates of ousted corporations were not a success but the Cuban government learned from the mistake and turned to small farmers, mostly working together in co-operatives. ANAP, the national association of small farmers, is a strong voice at the policy table, and farming is a popular career. Individuals can own, on the Usufruct system, up to 65 hectares (just over 160 acres). Life is tough in Cuba, largely because the USA next door wants to install unfettered capitalism and has maintained a blockade for six decades, but the food-first policies, allied to free (but resource-constrained) education and healthcare, have prevented collapse.
Would it take a revolution to make land available to new farmers in the UK, at a cost they could afford? The British have not had a revolution since 1642, and then in 1660, only 11 years after executing King Charles I in 1649, they proclaimed his son as King Charles II. The naturally conservative British like tradition.
But how would they act if really, really hungry? I think they would dig up their gardens, swap produce with their neighbours, press for allotments on public land, but a social revolution of the sort to split up large farms into new, ecologically sound mixed holdings, along with capital to invest in and run those farms, is hard to discern even with a powerful telescope.
Chris Smaje is right in principle about the imperative for more small farms, making use of “renewable bioenergetic flows”, resources like soil that can and should be replenished. But as he writes (p.260):
“In many places, one of the hardest but most important dimensions of that scrambling is drawing rural land into a more localised economy, whether as private holdings or commons [land which individuals may have rights to use, but do not own]. Small areas of urban greenspace are easily, if often transiently, commoned into community gardens and allotments, but it’s also necessary to repurpose huge swathes of agricultural cereals and grasslands as small mixed farms, smallholdings, cottages and commons. Aided and abetted by zoning restrictions, the land tends to be locked in a world-system of Ricardian rent and entry barriers to farming that puts it beyond the reach of any but a lucky few. This is a key battle to be won.”
A Ricardian rent is a financial surplus in excess of the costs necessary to deploy and use a resource, often resulting from scarcity. Land in a densely populated country like the UK gives a high Ricardian rent because its supply is relatively fixed, it is an investment class, and valued as a backdrop for expensive homes as well as for productive capacity. In the 21st century so far, productive capacity is of minor importance because of the European Union’s policy to subsidise farmland, enabling producers to remain on their land even if they make trading losses. The UK Government’s publication Agriculture in the United Kingdom 2019, published in July 2020, reports that 34% of farms in the UK failed to make a profit in 2018-19, on the basis of net farm income, and another 25% made less than £20,001. That meant nudging six in ten either lost money or were low-income, despite the subsidies they received. Subsidies from the EU, mainly payments per acre (benefiting large farms most), were 63% of total income from farming.
Farming employs just 1.45% of the UK’s workforce, about 476,000 people in 2019 both full- and part-time, and mainly farmers and their families, and the partners and directors of farming firms. It is a small industry in output terms, and governments have become used to treating food as just another set of tradeable commodities, and to disregarding food security.
Because of Brexit, farm subsidies from the EU to the UK are ending. While the downsides of Brexit are legion, it does create a rare opportunity for the nations of the UK to rethink farming support and land tenure, to improve national food security and social equity.
A Small Farm Future, by Chris Smaje, is published by Chelsea Green, ISBN 9781603589024 for the 312-page paperback version, 9781603589031 for the e-book. Guide price £18.99 for the paperback, £13.95 for the e-book.
PDR
Rethink!
Posted: October 24, 2020 Filed under: Agriculture, Ecology, Economics | Tags: Colin Tudge, Enlightened Agriculture, The Great Rethink 3 Comments
(Photo by PDR, November 2011)
Ecopolitics Today is back, starting with an introduction to The Great Rethink: a 21st Century Renaissance, a soon-to-be-published book by biologist and scientific author Colin Tudge. So here goes.
Yes, we are making the Earth uninhabitable for humans. Not a startling statement, but as Greta Thunberg has to keep pointing out, too few powerful people are trying to take corrective action.
Colin Tudge, in his new book The Great Rethink, notes that the personality traits driving ambitious people into positions of power and influence – such as the desire to secure wealth and political control for themselves and their associates – are the opposite of the characteristics required to share Earth’s resources between all people, living principled lives in thriving, diverse ecosystems. The big questions are how to remove power from those who crave it for themselves, and then how to transfer it to benign agents capable of enacting policies for Earth rescue.
‘Renaissance’ is an answer proposed by Colin Tudge in this book. By Renaissance he means the creation of societies that are convivial, in the sense of happily collaborative rather than fiercely competitive, and are set in a flourishing biosphere. Renaissance would be the work of “Ordinary Joes and Jos”, building the world they want alongside the extractive systems that now dominate. The author prefers the Renaissance concept over Revolution (unknown outcomes!) or Reform of the existing system (too slow and timid).
But time is the enemy, even of Renaissance. As the earthy character Arthur Fallowfield used to say on the radio comedy show Beyond Our Ken, “…the answer lies in the soil”. Yet topsoil is being lost at such alarming rates that its capacity to provide answers is but a fraction of its potential when the radio show was made between 1958 and 1964. The Sustainable Soils Alliance warns that soil is being lost ten times faster than it is being formed, that between 1850 and 2015 the UK lost 84% of its best-quality topsoil, and that the current annual soil loss from wind and water erosion, from this one small quartet of countries, is about 2.9 million tonnes, weighing as much as 240,000 double-decker buses.
Without soil, we cannot feed ourselves. This harsh truth is rushing towards us like an apocalyptic thunderbolt, but most governments do not seem to care.
Colin Tudge is especially skilled at interpreting and setting science in the wider context of our civilisation. He is a biologist who has spent decades explaining scientific topics to non-specialist audiences, has written several books including The Secret Life of Trees and Global Ecology, and in 2008 with his wife Ruth West launched the Campaign for Real Farming. Two years later the duo, with writer and former agricultural adviser to The Archers, Graham Harvey, set up the annual Oxford Real Farming Conference. Colin Tudge bridges the divide between humanities and sciences, famously labelled “the two cultures” by C P Snow back in 1959. Snow, in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, argued that the schism seriously complicated the task of advancing knowledge, culture and governance. In The Great Rethink Colin Tudge takes bridge rebuilding a step further into the world of metaphysics, essentially the study of mind, including our understandings of reality, and importantly what we do not know and can never know. In this respect, The Great Rethink is a work of philosophy as well as of anxiety at the current trajectory of Earth mismanagement.
The book is divided into six parts: setting out the problems, the goal to work towards, the fundamental importance of craft work in the production and preparation of good food, the necessary infrastructure, the scope and depth of thought required, and how to start translating thought into the next steps we need to take. William Morris and John Ruskin would appreciate the arguments, I think. This may alarm some technophiles, because William Morris, who died in 1896, and John Ruskin, who passed away on the 20th day of the 20th century, favoured skill and craftsmanship over the reduction of work to simple processes in automated factories, the assembly line mentality that has done so much to spur damaging, resource-gobbling techno-consumerism.
Colin Tudge proposes that the numbers of farmers in the UK needs to rise up to tenfold. There would be more small, mixed farms practising what he calls ‘Enlightened Agriculture’, and plant-based diets with some meat but not much, and a great deal of diversity. Food growing and cookery would become fundamental components of the school curriculum.
There is no shortage of potential farmers in the UK, evidenced by the interest in Wales’ policy for One Planet Developments, and the numbers applying to the Ecological Land Co-operative for smallholdings, but the status of land as a prime investment class in a neoliberal world means that, apart from special schemes like these, land is too expensive for new farmers who are ‘Ordinary Joes and Jos’.
Neoliberalism, the belief that market forces result in the most efficient decisions, has led us in completely the wrong direction, the book insists, far away from the co-operative, compassionate and convivial societies, living in flourishing ecosystems, that are our best hope of survival.
Personally I think we lack time for a Renaissance, to build a new structure capable of replacing the old one as it implodes, although I do not doubt the need for one. I am more inclined to think of scattered lifeboats, which could in time form a pioneer flotilla.
Colin Tudge has not lost hope, though. The very last sentence of the book is: “Truly we are on the brink of catastrophe but there is still hope”.
The Great Rethink: a 21st Century Renaissance is scheduled to be published on January 7th 2021, by Pari Publishing, ISBN (International Standard Book Number) 9788895604343, 364 pages. £15 to pre-order.
PDR, October 2020
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