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We live in a world where oligarchs accumulate land, use their media assets to denigrate natural foods, and invest in fake alternatives. On the other ‘side’, wealthy professionals calling themselves freedom-fighters travel the world and the internet insisting we should eat organic and local. Meanwhile, the food security of many of the eight billion plus of us remains at the mercy of the weather, diseases and insects. Neither side offers a viable solution, or much benefit for many beyond themselves..
An increasing realization of the corruption and greed that drives much of our New Normal is motivating a growing movement for self-sufficiency. Local sourcing of natural-grown foods is coupled with denigration of big agribusiness and industrialized food production. Incoherently, it is also often coupled with claims that those backing the big agribusiness enemy are aiming for depopulation, while the way in which small-scale agriculture will feed the world’s growing population is left unexplained.
From the comfort of big jet planes made in huge factories, it is now possible to gain likes by posting photos of the organic and rather cute livestock we left back home. These can be supplemented with pictures of the Thai rice, Costa Rican coffee and Mexican avocados from our favorite brunch spot. This approach to food and agriculture is a hobby, and a good one. But the world cannot support eight billion such hobbies.
The other side of the Agriculture coin has also been doing us harm; an obese population in rich countries with declining life expectancy, fat on industrial corn syrup, seed oils and other unnatural metabolism adulterators, coupled with declining physical activity. Nor are we gaining by unevidenced claims that diets including meat or raw milk will somehow restart an age of plagues. Or that humans should transform themselves into insectivores.
Regulating independent family farmers out of business, with their generations of knowledge, is not a step forward either but a decimation of rural society and human dignity - of the reason for living in the first place. Replacing them with centralized fake food factories funded by wealthy investors and their pet celebrities will concentrate wealth rather than food security. To survive and thrive - all of us - we need to face the realities of growing and delivering huge quantities of healthy, human food.
We feed far more, and live far better, than past Malthusians predicted because we grow more food and store and transport it more effectively than they thought we could. That is not an ‘elitist’ thing, it is quite the opposite. Like the rest of life, we need to continue to progress, but keep that progress in all our hands rather than a greed-driven few. The unavoidable challenge of all human progress, and a challenge our agencies are now failing. But in fighting for food freedom, we must still feed over eight billion. This means investing in large-scale farm machinery and supply and food management infrastructure; in large agricultural enterprises.
Living the rural dream
I live on a few acres, and this produces about 70% of my family’s food thanks to a lot of trudging through mud. We eat mostly our own meat, our own eggs (chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys), vegetables, and in season our own fruit and milk. If you have a good external income, and a few acres of well-watered fertile land, you can do this and still go to restaurants, drive a car, and travel for conferences and holidays. We are very fortunate. By the standard of most people on earth, highly privileged. It is hard work and stinks after rain, but it’s rewarding. It feel good to eat the fruit of your own labor.
We grow most of our own food partly for health reasons, partly to have something to rely on if things get really bad. We also do it because it is, at times, fun. In good months we also save money. Recently, a hurricane came through followed by three weeks of near continuous heavy rain. The cost of recovery just for the little land and fences we have is going to be well above the total market value of all our livestock, and probably negate two years of savings on groceries. We will recover because, in keeping with a minority of humanity, we have good external resources to draw on.
Hurricane aside, we have lost two breeding stock and one intended for the table in the past two months due to parasitic worm infestations (a curse of warm humid environments). We would have lost more without modern pharmaceuticals and supplementary (i.e. externally-purchased) stockfeed. If we could not afford the fence repairs, we would have no livestock at all. Our in-soil veggies and two fruit trees are also rotting due to the exceptionally wet weather. Last week another tree fell onto a fence, adrift in the hyper-saturated soil.
If we were really subsistence farmers, like most small-scale farmers are globally, we would now face starvation or the loss of our land and future income. Like people in the West also did before the industrial revolution transformed agriculture, and as hundreds of millions in other countries still do. This is why we now have large farms with a lot of equipment. So that they can be resilient.
A friend nearby farms 6000 acres of cereals. They plant out genetically modified seed, treat them with herbicides and pesticides at certain intervals, and harvest when they are ripe and dry. This farming is extremely fossil fuel and labor intensive - ploughing, seeding, spraying, harvesting. Even with this, corn can grow fungus in the cobs or large acreages can be lost due to rain. They are completely at the mercy of the weather. Enough but not too much rain, and sun at the right time. With 6000 acres owned or leased, a couple of families make a modest living. None, if it rains at harvest time.
Last year, they lost about $20,000 of crops simply to blackbirds. This year, with the hurricane, they lost an entire crop of sorghum. Unpredicted rain this week wiped out the entire rice crop, just as it was drying enough from the 3 weeks of rain to be fit for harvest. But they still have to pay for the seed, the fuel, the installments on their machinery, and everything else a family needs. They will not have an income this year, which is something most salaried people ─ fed through the farmers’ precarious efforts ─ will never experience. If they can muster the resources, the farmers will buy seed, fertilizer and thousands of gallons of fuel, to try again next year. Or they will lose it all. They will probably never get rich and are always in debt. A combine harvester costs almost half a million dollars. Modern cereal croppers must live on debt. There is no prospect of the windfall farming boom that software and biotech engineers hope for.
Surviving the urban dream
An hour north, there is a city of over three million people. Most live on small suburban blocks or in apartments and work much of the day in an office or factory, or even a shop selling food. To eat, they rely on a huge network they are barely aware of. This network drills the oil, builds the machinery, acquires the harvest or livestock, processes it and preserves it, and transports it close enough, at a low enough price, for them to buy. They can supplement it with backyard or hydroponic vegetables or a few eggs, but without this vast network the city could not exist.
Without this and other vast cities, organic hobby farmers could not fly to conferences on freedom and self-sufficiency, drive cars, or post on the Internet. There would be no fuel, no smartphones and no colleges for their kids. None of the medicines that sometimes stop kids dying and adults going blind, as they often used to. This is why, over hundreds of years, we have expanded cities and increasingly differentiated occupations. Because we can only have these things if most of us don’t have to spend most of our time growing food, and if we don’t have mass human die-offs when the weather turns bad.
New York and Greater London are roughly three times the size of our nearest city, and the world has a dozen of more cities of over 20 million people. They are packed - more than half of humanity lives in urban areas - and they all need feeding, or they will die. They cannot grow their own food - at least nowhere near enough to live on. They are busy doing those things the rest of us rely on, and they have almost no space. They can dabble for fun and health, but their survival hinges on a massive industry of growing, transporting, preserving and delivering vast quantities of food.
Long ago, most people in the West subsisted off the land. Life was generally confined to the local village, women commonly died in childbirth and children before their fifth birthday. Many never left the vicinity of their village, as they had no savings, means of transport or free time in which to do so. Consecutive bad seasons often meant mass starvation. Over the past couple of hundred years our population has massively increased, and we have, despite the predictions of Malthusians, actually managed not only to feed ourselves, but to increasingly over feed ourselves.
Today, in many African and Asian economies, small-scale low-tech farming still remains the norm. It uses low levels of fertilizer, minimal machinery or fossil fuel and few anti-parasitic medications or pesticides. The families that run them lose children to easily preventable diseases, mothers to childbirth, and daughters to child marriage. Walking through mud all day bent over under the hot sun, with your child lying with fever in the two-room hovel, is not a good life. Watching stunted children crouched on a floor eating white rice and few leaves for their main meal causes the rural ideal to lose its romance. It is why so many young people leave at the first opportunity. Otherwise, they can never, on their meager small-holdings, get out of poverty.
Cars, air conditioning, overseas holidays and cancer surgery may be things traditional small-holder farmers read about, but the technology revolution that gave them to us remains inaccessible. They will need less people farming per acre, as small farms simply cannot provide the capital with which to purchase such things that we, writing and reading articles such as this in the West, consider quite basic to our lives.
Serving more than eight billion
Tens of millions of people receive external food aid to prevent them starving to death in normal years and with 350 million in acute food insecurity, this goes up when there are bad seasons. The Green Revolution - the increase in agricultural output over the past several decades - has kept this relatively constant as the total population increased massively, confounding the Malthusians. But it remains precarious as long as the technologies and fertilizers driving it are concentrated in few hands, as long as genetically-modified crops can be owned by a few companies. Much of the Green Revolution remains poorly accessible where populations are increasing most rapidly - in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia. These growing populations need high yield agriculture to be expanded, rather than hobbled by distant and wealthy idealists.
This is not an argument for corporate takeover of farming - farmers should have the right to kill and sell their own stock (obviously) and local sourcing should be encouraged. We will continue drinking raw milk and eating red meat and a natural human diet. Our society has done well because our food industry was generally diverse and competitive, and fossil fuels keep our food safe and accessible. The five-year plans of Mao, Stalin and Khrushchev, like the centralized madness proposed by the UN and WEF today, served only the few whilst bringing famine, and the promise of future famine, to the many.
But, if we are to live as most would like, and not die unnecessarily young, and feed our massive cities, we will need to expand most of the trappings and innovations that have proven former Malthusians wrong. Local sourcing alone brings local starvation when things get bad, unless there is an alternate to come to the rescue that is able to preserve and transport food from elsewhere. The people who make our airplanes and maintain our internet also have to eat - cheaply enough that they too can fly and surf the web as we do. If we believe in basic equality and freedom, then we need to also support the aspirations of struggling semi-subsistence farmers in poorer countries who dream of doing the same.
Embrace reality
The two approaches are not mutually exclusive - a competitive market can support local sourcing for those where food is grown, feed cities, and disseminate wealth. Destruction of big agriculture is starvation for many, while centralized control by the rich WEF oligarchs who currently seek to destroy smaller farmers and force us onto highly processed factory food will eventually do the same. To steer a middle and rational approach, we first need to keep our feet on the ground.
Otherwise, natural food advocates will look like the Malthusians they seek to oppose. We can all try self-sustainability if we only have a billion or so on the planet, as our forebears did. Life will be rather feudal, but the rich and the big landowners, who will rapidly accumulate others’ land during droughts and floods, will be happy. However, if we value the lives of all of us here and now, we had better be serious about feeding all of us.
Food freedom should mean open markets, farmer rights and ensuring this absolutely vital part of supporting humanity remains in the hands of many, not a few. We need big productive farms, and we need them run by people who understand the land rather than distant investment funds, software entrepreneurs or sycophants of the latest Davos-fascist group-think.
Hobby farming will continue to be a viable and good alternative for those fortunate and wealthy, but aiming to dismantle the Green Revolution is dangerously close to willful depopulation . We should fight to reduce its environmental harms, wherever we can show this will not leave millions hungry. But the fight should primarily be for a path out of poverty and the freedom to choose, not a fight for the utopia of a privileged few.
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