On the Need to Raise Hell as Well as Cucumbers…
Stan Cox is on a roll over at CommonDreams.org; in a percipient and timely essay he reminds us that simply cultivating our back (or front, in defiance of the HOA) yard is not enough to fix the corporate version of agriculture. Our dependence on staple “commodity” crops like grain and oil-seeds (hard to grow on small parcels) is not only abject, it’s historically engineered…
Humanity’s attachment to cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds has acquired a much harder edge in the industrial era, but as a base for political and economic power, the staple grains have always been unsurpassed. Because they hold calories and nutrients in a dense package that can be easily stored for long periods and transported, the more fortunate members of ancient societies could accumulate surpluses. Those surpluses are recognized by the majority of scholars as necessary to the birth of market economies, which allowed the prosperous to exercise control over society’s have-nots. Eventually, states used control over grains to exert political power over entire populations.
Few foods could have filled that role. Noting that before grain agriculture came along, ancient Egyptians might have gathered a surplus of various foods from nature, most of them highly perishable, economic historian Robert Allen once wrote, “If all a tax collector could get from foragers was a load of waterlilies that would wilt by next morning, what was the point of having them?” The Pharaohs managed to exert control over the area’s population only after people started farming wheat and barley.
The even bigger problem with grains — which are short-lived annual plants, grown largely in monoculture — is that they supplanted the diverse, perennial plant ecosystems that covered the earth before the dawn of agriculture. We’ve been living with the resulting soil erosion and water pollution ever since.
Then, when grains became fully commodified a couple of centuries ago, things really started to go downhill. In discussing his new book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Raj Patel cited India as an example: “The social safety nets that existed in India under feudal society had been knocked away by the British. If people couldn’t afford food, they didn’t get to eat, and if they couldn’t buy food, they starved. As a result of the imposition of markets in food, 13 million people across the world died in the 19th century. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism. Those are the origins of markets in food.”
Indeed, if capitalism were a wine, it would be a wine that doesn’t go well with any type of food.
Most food today is produced not as an end in itself but as a by-product of a global economy with the singular goal of turning maximum profit. That is a dysfunctional arrangement, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founder of ecological economics explained almost 40 years ago in his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process: “So vital is the dependence of terrestrial life on the energy received from the sun that the cyclic rhythm in which this energy reaches each region on the earth has gradually built itself through natural selection into the reproductive pattern of almost every species, vegetal or animal … Yet the general tenor among economists has been to deny any substantial difference between the structures of agricultural and industrial productive activities.”
Industrial or commercial output can be increased by building more capacity, stepping up the consumption of inputs, taking on more workers, and pushing workers harder and for longer hours. Farming, by contrast, is inevitably bound by the calendar - by month-to-month variation in the capacity of soil and sunlight to support the growth of plants. It depends fundamentally on the productivity and the habits of non-human biological organisms over which humans can exert control only up to a point.
That clearly isn’t the ideal pattern for efficient wealth generation, so the past century has seen relentless efforts to mold agriculture into the factory model as closely as possible and, where that can’t be done, to graft more easily regimented industries — farm machinery, fertilizers, chemicals, food processing, the restaurant industry, packaging, advertising — onto an agricultural rootstock. In the US, the dollar outputs of those dependent industries are growing at two to four times the rate of agriculture’s own dollar output, putting ever-greater demands on the soil.
With a wholesale shift toward mechanization of US agriculture, 75 percent of economic output now comes from fewer than 7 percent of farms; furthermore, there has been a steep rise in the proportion of farms owned by investors living in distant cities (some of them perhaps avid urban gardeners).
One could take issue with bits and bobs of Cox’s article; I think he underestimates the productivity of small-scale dense polyculture, but even so, his big-picture sketch is a welcome reality check. Relocalising our food supply means more than just tending our own little gardens — though they are well worth tending. But as Cox concludes,
With land and wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (and with more prisoners than farmers in today’s America) we have actually reached a point at which land reform is as necessary here as it is in any nation of Latin America or Asia. Only when we get more people back on the land, working to feed people and not Monsanto, will the system have a chance to work.
Actually… after such a stunning reform, “the system” would not be anything that we’ve ever known as such. It would be something so different that it we could hardly call it “the system” — it would be an ecosystem, with all the complexity and fractal variation that this implies, rather than a “system” in the dimbrained, mechanistic/engineering sense that the chief apologists for capitalism (economists, I mean) iconified by borrowing (without permission or blessing) the formal style of Newtonian physics…
Neoclassical economics began as a project to fashion an economic model in the image of Newtonian mechanics, one in which economic agents could be treated as if they were particles obeying mechanical laws, and all of whose behaviour could, in principle, be described simultaneously by a solvable system of equations. This narrative required the treatment of human desires as fundamental data, which, like the masses of physical bodies in classical mechanics, are not affected by the relations being modelled. […] [T]he dream of a determinate model of the economic universe was realized in the 1870s by William Stanley Jevons and, especially, by Léon Walras, both of whom were in part physicists by training. Called the model of general equilibrium, this elaborate mechanistic metaphor, proudly devoid of empirical content, remains the grand narrative of economic theory for students and economists everywhere.
“The Strange History of Economics” from the PAE Review.
As an astute commenter at ET notes
In an opinion piece in the April, 2008 issue of “Scientific American” Robert Nadeau, who teaches environmental science and public policy at George Mason University notes that the founders of Neo-classical economics, W.S.Jevons, Leon Walrus, Maria Edgeworth and Vilfredo Paraeto did not derive from observation the rigorous mathematical formulations which were credited with transforming economics into a science. Instead they borrowed them from von Helmholtz who proposed them as a solution to lacunae in Newtonian physics to account for phenomena of heat, light and electricity. Other theories prevailed in physics, James Clerk Maxwell’s Electrical Field Theory and Boltzmann’s formulations in thermodynamics, for instance. Physicists and mathematicians told the economists that there was no theoretical basis for substituting economic variables for physical variables in Helmholtz’s equations, but they were undeterred. This “borrowing” was forgotten and subsequent generations of “mainstream” economists accepted the claim that the theory was scientific.
Neo-classical Economics is essentially a rhetorical system, rather like a collection of “Just So” stories, that is axiomatic and well adapted to confounding critics. If a student disagrees with the axions, they will not do well in the class. Adam Smith’s METAPHOR of “the invisible hand of the market” has been inflated beyond all recognition to become more like the LEFT HAND OF GOD. Tobin at Yale has commented to the effect that, after 200 years, if it was more than a metaphor one would think that the economists would have at least articulated some of the fingers.
I wish this book were not so darned expensive…
In this clever, original, and wide-ranging study Philip Mirowski criticizes neoclassical economics for using metaphors and analogies from physics. As Mirowski sees it, physics analogies were inappropriate in the first place, and the founders of modern economics picked the wrong metaphor to boot. The physics which economics has mimicked is vintage 1860 and cannot deal with entropy, let alone relativity or quantum theory. Economists fell into these errors because they did not understand the physics they borrowed and were poor mathematicians, shallow logicians, and in some cases unscrupulous academics who emulated science in order to appropriate respectability at the expense of “soft” sociologists.
[…] Physics envy in economics, as Mirowski calls it, has a long and dishonorable history.
It sounds like a good read. And the phrase that leaps out at me is that one about the vintage 1860 physics which economists appropriated as a respectable armature on which to hang their apologia for greed and the primacy of financiers. A physics which cannot deal with entropy? Refusing to deal with entropy is kinda like refusing to deal with gravity… not a good idea. As the real-world crises all around us illustrate, in living colour.
Aside from cultivating our own gardens, we have some weeding to do in the realm of public ideas — starting with the self-serving, disingenuous and wrongheaded mishmash of wishful thinking and Lysenkoism that is “modern economics.”
Howard:
Perhaps we could think of the “invisible hand” metaphor as a very, very crude first attempt to think about emergent systems. One difference (and a problem with using anthropomorphic metaphors like the i.h.) is that of course emergent systems don’t have intentionality and so of course don’t care about what’s “best” — they just emerge however they’re going to emerge.
31 May 2008, 9:31 amStan:
I am very encouraged that Georgescu-Roegen (and not just Marx and Chomsky et al, muchasilovem) is being quoted at Commondreams.
And I appreciate De talking about the necessity for political organization and action. Glad the “as well as” was left instead of tempting a false dichotomy. The importance of gardening is more than producing consumable goods.
Norman Wirzba says it very well:
another $.02 — Not sure if the invisible hand is the right metaphor, since it has never ever even for a short time functioned in an emergent manner… it has always been tacked on as an explanation and excuse after shouting and crying had passed from plain, naked violence and plunder. Emergent systems have intrinsic stabilities that develop and adapt over time. Capitalism has been an iatrogenic escalation of instability, which is always fobbed onto the least powerful and the environment.
31 May 2008, 4:46 pmMary:
Our so-called “food rules” are such blatant propaganda by the industrial machine! We do not need grains, nor dairy and people have lived for millions of years without either. Coast Salish had thriving populations here with the magnificant foodstuffs available in the region.
It is time to rethink how we eat- bread, cereal, cookies — all lock us into dependence on the “machine”. Their convenience is so seductive though! cheap calories without thinking.
Now they are going to use GMO beets for sugar so it is time to get to know your local bee keeper!
1 June 2008, 2:00 pmmurph:
Need to take a look at what happened when Eleanor Roosevelt got the victory garden going. What I have read is that it supplied over 50% of the available food for the population at the time.
6 June 2008, 1:01 amBruce F:
What do you think of terra preta/biochar?
I’ve come across some interesting links/posts and wondered how it fit with in with the ideas on permaculture that you talk about here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta#Modern_research_to_recreate_Terra_preta
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/taxonomy/term/39/9
http://hypography.com/forums/terra-preta/index3.html
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/002347.html
12 June 2008, 6:00 pmRhisiart Gwilym:
Siwmae Bruce,
I’m actually stumbling and groping my way into doing terra preta permaculture right now. I had a bit to tell about it in De’s previous post here on Humanure.
Can offer also David Blume’s article on his website, describing the breathtaking productivity (with attendant enhanced ecological gracing) when he was producing food full time for several hundred people from a two-acre, steep-slope site.
(Sorry, I’m on K’s computer at the moment and a bit unhandy with her systems, so I can’t go looking for a link without losing this post. So — google David Blume permaculture)
Regarding grain permaculture: never forget that Fukuoka, for years before he retired, was producing premium yields of grain on one-eighth-acre plots with his famous ‘do nothing’ system of growing: no till, no fertiliser, no pesticides, no herbicides. Marc Bonfils in France and elsewhere has been confirming this independently with his ’self-fertile soil’ ideas.
Looks as if workload this year will enforce my first foray into micro-plot grain growing to be a ‘Winter’ operation: plant later in the year, harvest next year. But already I have several hundred potato plants growing well, and foreshadowing something like a ton of tubers for later this year (deo valente!) to be clamped in the field for slow use, in the old traditional way used here (Britain). All of these plants are growing on a variant of Ruth Stout’s mulch-gardening method, developed by a grower in Kentucky (can’t find the damned reference again now!), which uses cardboard sheetmulch, then scythe-mulch (any old wild herb’n'grass stand that you can get at with a scythe, cut and dried just minimally) on top for the spuds to grow in. Each sprouting chit gets about a pint of compost material to sit in, on the mulch, but otherwise is fed entirely by regular waterings of comfrey-tea liquid feed.
‘Earth-up’ as the haulms grow not with earth but with successive layers of scythe mulch, which both feeds the soil as it breaks down, suppresses volunteer growth, and provides a clean, dryish cradling for the developing tuber crop.
One of my grand-dads was Irish, so I’m very aware of the danger of relying too heavily on spuds, which don’t have the hard/dry storage capacity of grains. An Gorta Mhor is still very much alive in the mind of modern Eire and all its diaspora children. On the other hand, the original Andean cultivators of potatoes dried them routinely for storage, so I shall be experimenting with some of my crop this year in my solar dryer, to see what happens.
Hwyl fawr i bawb, Rh
21 June 2008, 9:30 pmCharles:
The Food Chain
Food Is Gold, So Billions Invested in Farming
Emergent Asset Management
A cattle farm in South Africa is among the holdings of Emergent Asset Management.
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By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
Published: June 5, 2008
Huge investment funds have already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into booming financial markets for commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans.
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The Food Chain
Production and Motivation
Articles in this series are examining growing demands on, and changes in, the world’s production of food.
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Leaders Speak of Their Own Issues at a Conference Addressing Food Shortages (June 5, 2008)
Monsanto Seeks Big Increase in Crop Yields (June 5, 2008)
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Ben Garvin for The New York Times
Andrew J. Redleaf, head of the hedge fund Whitebox Advisors, bought several grain elevators from ConAgra and Cargill.
But a few big private investors are starting to make bolder and longer-term bets that the world’s need for food will greatly increase — by buying farmland, fertilizer, grain elevators and shipping equipment.
One has bought several ethanol plants, Canadian farmland and enough storage space in the Midwest to hold millions of bushels of grain.
Another is buying more than five dozen grain elevators, nearly that many fertilizer distribution outlets and a fleet of barges and ships.
And three institutional investors, including the giant BlackRock fund group in New York, are separately planning to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in agriculture, chiefly farmland, from sub-Saharan Africa to the English countryside.
“It’s going on big time,” said Brad Cole, president of Cole Partners Asset Management in Chicago, which runs a fund of hedge funds focused on natural resources. “There is considerable interest in what we call ‘owning structure’ — like United States farmland, Argentine farmland, English farmland — wherever the profit picture is improving.”
These new bets by big investors could bolster food production at a time when the world needs more of it.
The investors plan to consolidate small plots of land into more productive large ones, to introduce new technology and to provide capital to modernize and maintain grain elevators and fertilizer supply depots.
But the long-term implications are less clear. Some traditional players in the farm economy, and others who study and shape agriculture policy, say they are concerned these newcomers will focus on profits above all else, and not share the industry’s commitment to farming through good times and bad.
“Farmland can be a bubble just like Florida real estate,” said Jeffrey Hainline, president of Advance Trading, a 28-year-old commodity brokerage firm and consulting service in Bloomington, Ill. “The cycle of getting in and out would be very volatile and disruptive.”
By owning land and other parts of the agricultural business, these new investors are freed from rules aimed at curbing the number of speculative bets that they and other financial investors can make in commodity markets. “I just wonder if they need some sheep’s clothing to put on,” Mr. Hainline said.
Mark Lapolla, an adviser to institutional investors, is also a bit wary of the potential disruption this new money could cause. “It is important to ask whether these financial investors want to actually operate the means of production — or simply want to have a direct link into the physical supply of commodities and thereby reduce the risk of their speculation,” he said.
Grain elevators, especially, could give these investors new ways to make money, because they can buy or sell the actual bushels of corn or soybeans, rather than buying and selling financial derivatives that are linked to those commodities.
When crop prices are climbing, holding inventory for future sale can yield higher profits than selling to meet current demand, for example. Or if prices diverge in different parts of the world, inventory can be shipped to the more profitable market.
“It’s a huge disadvantage to not be able to trade the physical commodity,” said Andrew J. Redleaf, founder of Whitebox Advisors, a hedge fund management firm in Minneapolis.
Mr. Redleaf bought several large grain elevator complexes from ConAgra and Cargill last year for a long-term stake in what he sees as a high-growth business. The elevators can store 36 million bushels of grain.
“We discovered that our lease customers, major food company types, are really happy to see us, because they are apt to see Cargill and ConAgra as competitors,” he said.
The executives making such bets say that fears about their new role are unfounded, and that their investments will be a plus for farming and, ultimately, for consumers.
“The world is asking for more food, more energy. You see a huge demand,” said Axel Hinsch, chief executive of Calyx Agro, a division of the giant Louis Dreyfus Commodities, which is buying tens of thousands of acres of cropland in Brazil with the backing of big institutional investors, including AIG Investments.
22 June 2008, 7:30 pmHoward:
Rhysiart & Bruce F, Might Rhysiart be referring to “Weedless Gardening” by Lee Reich when he mentions the variant above? Reich is not from Kentucky that I know of, but I think he is doing a take-off on Ruth Stout’s methods. If you dig up another reference on this, I’d be very interested. Patricia Lanza also has a technique she call “Lasagna gardening” in a book of the same name & she is originally from Tennessee I think. I think it is not considered completely eco-friendly by some, as it has a peat moss requirement to get it started.
Ruth Stout’s books that I know of are “The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book” or “How to have a green thumb without an aching back” or “Gardening without work: for the aging, the busy, and the indolent” — I have got one of them used (can’t recall which one, as I’m not at home now). The first two are from the early 70’s and are out of print. You can google to find used copies, which is what I did.
Rhysiart, by the way, we plan to be in the UK in July in the Bristol area, and northern Wales looks awfully close on the map (to an American anyway). Since it’s possibly the last time we get to do any extended travel before peak oil lowers the boom on relatively cheap air fares, I was wondering if Cae Mabon is accepting visitors or if there is any other permaculture-related site of interest in the English southwest or west.
23 June 2008, 9:21 amHoward:
to the moderator: in my last post’s last paragraph I talked to another poster about essentially meeting up. Don’t know if that’s appropriate on your site, so if it’s not, could you please edit out that last graf and let the rest of my post stand? Apologies for causing you any extra work.
23 June 2008, 9:23 amRhisiart Gwilym:
Siwmae Howard,
Could be Lee Reich who described the method of potato growing. Trouble is, it was in a discussion thread on some gardeners’ site, and I kept no reference. And I could easily have just tacked ‘Kentucky’ onto an incomplete memory, without justice.
Anyway, the method itself is working beautifully here, with near-absolute-zero volunteer plants needing to be pulled/smothered. Oddly, the slugs too, though they visit, don’t seem to be eating my potato plants at all, except for just one unlucky (for some reason) plant. Can’t explain that. Any ideas?
One thing that I forgot to emphasise is that another highly useful part of these methods which I’m teaching myself, trial-and-quite-few-errors style, is long-handled clippers.
I made a pair myself. I took the wooden handles off a pair of ordinary garden shears, and welded long tubes onto them; then bent each tube at several points to make the tool comfortable for me to clip at ground level from a relaxed upright position. The back ends of the tubes project behind me, and I welded steel counterweights to the back ends, until the whole tool is nicely balanced to glide the blades just above ground level as I clip. Quite weighty, but relaxed and easy to use, with a surprising area clipped in quite a short time. A useful complement to my scythe, and perfect for close, detailed clipping of unwanted plants around the food plants. Take care, though. Very easy, whilst you’re still learning to handle it, to clip off a food plant right at ground level, by mistake. Damn!
The idea was given to me by a fellow-member of the HDRA (British gardeners’ charitable organisation) years back. He grew food exclusively in TURF (!!) with a high clover content (white is best, but any will do) to fix atmospheric nitrogen as nitrate fertiliser. His two main tools to get good results were the clippers (and later a very narrow hand-pushed lawn mower, that he made himself, to clip very rapidly between rows), plus a potent liquid feed which he made — I’m not making this up! — by laying down sheets of this and that, wood, ply, cardboard, flat masonry slabs, etc., and occasionally harvesting worm-casts from underneath them. The casts, heavily diluted with water, were a kind of superfood slurry for all his food vegs.
This method gave excellent yields, by his descriptions. And even at the fastest-growing times of year, he reckoned that one clip/mow every 10-14 days replaced all digging, forking, raking, hoeing and weeding. Each clip cut short not just the grass, but also the clover, of course. And as the clover was cut back, there seems to have been a corresponding die-back of their roots, which released a burst of nitrates from the Nitrobacter-filled root nodules common to all legumes, causing a grown-spurt in the food plants. This periodic cutting, plus watering with liquid feed was all he did. But he got excellent food growth, all standing in a tidy ‘lawn’.
Neat, eh?
About visiting Cae Mabon:
Eric (Maddern) is a always a relaxed host for unexpected visitors, since he gets so many. A preliminary phone call would be useful to him, though. His numbers are 01286-871542 (landline) and 07789-810115 (mobile). Email: eric@fachwen.org
Sadly, health and overstretch matters mean that I’m no longer working on Eric’s garden, so I don’t know its present state. I just work the one permaculture set-up now, where I live.
Unfortunately, visiting that in July is likely to be problematic, because I’m likely to be away much of the time, with things being lightly supervised by the neighbour who will be feeding my dogs. They are ferocious guards against anyone who thinks to trespass when I’m not there. (Turkish Shepherd Dogs: absolutely not to be trifled with) But I’d recommend a visit to Cae Mabon to anyone. It’s a truly wonderful creation there, that Eric has made happen. And you never know: maybe fate will decree that we should meet, after all.
Cofion gorau, Rhisiart G
29 June 2008, 2:18 amStan:
Rhisiart, you can always get my attention with worm-castings. Asking you and others about this, so bear with me. It’ll be fast, because Sherry and I are leaving the world a couple of weeks (vacation to visit old and ailing parents).
I’d not realized that boards could concentrate worm-castings; but I’ve long employed the plywood sheet to collect bait for fishing. One good nightcrawler can be converted into two plump bream. But of course they eat and excrete (duh) while they are under that board; and I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before.
When I talked once with Susan Quimby-Honer (known locally by kids as “the worm lady”), our Raleigh-based vermiculturist, she said we should think about just raising the worms right in the garden. Esay, right? Just skip a step. Unfortunately, it was a hit-and-run encounter as I was being called back to help build a re-used materials shed (longer story).
Question is, can the light-blocking cover (like the board) be combined with a mechanism for feeding the worms kitchen scraps? Year before last, I tried to partially bury a plastic plant pot with the bottom removed, and cover that with scraps inside (thinking the hungry Oligochaeta would crawl up at night and chow down). No such luck. The stuff just composted down at the usual (seemingly) glacial pace, with clouds of gnats calling their friends to supper. No worms.
Would cutting a hole in a sheet of old (untreated) plywood work, if I chop the scraps really fine for my toothless light-shy neighbors? Anyone tried in-the-ground vermiculture?
29 June 2008, 6:31 amHoward:
Rhisiart, that is a great description of the clippers — and, like Stan, I really sat up and took notice when you mentioned the worm casting thing. Our itinerary in the UK has filled up now that the reality of it has dawned on us with just a few days left before we go there. One never knows — I have got the directions anyway.
Health & Peace,
Howard
1 July 2008, 5:25 pm