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The Case Against Techno-Fixes with Chris Smaje
254 Plays1 month ago
In the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, the solutions we hear the most are technological ones - many of which mirror the economic and philosophical approaches that precipitated these crises in the first place. But what if that vision is flawed? Chris Smaje, author of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, challenges the dominant eco-modernist philosophy head-on. He critiques its reliance on techno-fixes—not just on technological grounds, but also economic, political, and spiritual ones.
In this episode, Chris shares an alternative vision: a localist, agro-ecological approach to modern agriculture, rooted in self-provisioning for our basic needs and leveraging natural cycles instead of hyper-technological systems. It’s a vision that reconnects us to the land, promotes food sovereignty, and rethinks what a feasible and fulfilling future could look like.
In this episode, we dive into:
- Why he wrote Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, inspired by a critique of prominent environmental and agricultural thinker George Monbiot.
- What our environmental crises reveal about the deeper flaws in our econmic systems.
- How industrial agriculture’s obsession with efficiency undermines ecological and social resilience.
- The ecological work of animals and why they’re vital to sustainable farming systems.
- The drive toward urbanism and the assumptions—often misguided—about its benefits for the planet.
- Reimagining quality of life beyond financial measures.
- And much more…
More about Chris:
Chris Smaje helps run a small farm in Somerset, England and has worked as a commercial vegetable grower and an academic social scientist. He’s recently published two books, A Small Farm Future (2020) and Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future (2023). He’s currently at work on a third – Lights for a Dark Age – all published by Chelsea Green.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
Introduction and Importance of Political Conversations
00:00:01
Speaker
We need to have a much more difficult political conversations about things like access to land inequality and you know who gets to make these kinds of decisions, who gets to farm, you know what kinds of food can we realistically produce. But ultimately, those are the kinds of conversations I think we need to be having.
Meet the Hosts: Emma Ratcliffe and Austin Unruh
00:00:30
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Ratcliffe. And I'm Austin Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
Introducing Chris and His Book on Agrarian Localism
00:01:01
Speaker
Welcome, Chris, to Agrarian Futures. Austin and I are really excited to be talking to you today. I have in front of me your latest book, Saying No to a Farm Free Future. We are particularly keen in talking to you because we feel that the vision that you articulate around this agrarian localism is the closest thing we've found so far that kind of described what we've been trying to figure out for ourselves.
00:01:26
Speaker
through our own work and through our interviews with people. And like Austin was mentioning right before this, I think you do a really good job of both articulating the vision that you want to see that's more place-based, local, designed around self-provisioning for our basic needs. And also the case against this other future that we kind of hear in the media and kind of here among kind of our governments and elected officials, it's this more techno-centered, eco-modernist future. and I would say also for me, there is a personal resonance because one of the reasons I want to start this podcast is while I was in business school, a lot of what I would hear around climate change was this techno future. like The idea that tech and apps
00:02:14
Speaker
and more precise science is the way that we're going to solve this. And I think we both felt me and Austin that you just don't hear any other alternative articulated and a lot of people are left kind of feeling powerless and like there's nothing they can do. So without further ado, I would love to start us off with talking about kind of the impetus for your latest book, Saying No to a Farm Free Future.
Critique of Eco-modernism and Techno-fixes
00:02:39
Speaker
This book emerged initially out of a response to George Monbiot's book,
00:02:44
Speaker
Regenesis, George Monbiot for people that don't know and the audience is probably the poster child for the the kind of high-tech, eco-modernist future. And his latest book, Regenesis, kind of talks about the promise of lab-grown meat and kind of people in city living a kind of very sustainable, quote unquote, sustainable life with kind of large areas that are taken out of this horrible extractive agriculture and Turned into kind of nature conserved. So I didn't actually read his book. It sounds i too depressing to read honestly for me, but It starts off could you tell us a little bit about this view this George Monbiot regenesis view and what drove you to Want to write a response to it?
00:03:31
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And thanks very much for inviting me on the, on the show. I guess there's kind of a backstory to it in that, I mean, George Monbiot, probably less well-known in the US than in the UK, but he's been one of the few voices for sort of ah a radical environmentalist kind of perspective with a kind of major media platform, you know, writing for the Guardian newspaper.
00:03:54
Speaker
I've interacted with him a little bit over the years. Back in 2015, the ecomodernist manifesto was published, and George and I kind of interacted positively around a critique of that, you know and and this is a vision. I mean, the sort of specific technologies change, but back then, you know it's all about GM crops, it's about nuclear energy, it's about urbanism and sort of getting people out of the countryside and rewilding the countryside. and I wrote a critique of that which George endorsed basically. But in the years since then, he's sort of drifted increasingly towards embracing pretty much that vision and wrote his book, Regenesis, which unfortunately my response, it hasn't generated a particularly useful debate with George. so you know I don't know the extent to which we should focus in on sort of my issues with him or his book. But i mean basically,
00:04:51
Speaker
His book starts off with a critique of sort of mainstream so-called conventional farming, which I largely agree with. i mean you know So many aspects of modern sort of global commodity farming are problematic, so you know I basically agree with the critique. but then He doesn't really engage with agroecological alternatives to that, doesn't really engage with this global movement for food sovereignty, kind of damns it with faint praise really. And then ultimately his book lands on this kind of microbial manufactured food route as a way
00:05:29
Speaker
you know It's partly coming from a sort of vegan critique of livestock farming. It's coming from, you know in many ways, a powerful and well-taken concern over biodiversity loss. so ah But that's where I think kind of a slightly in imputing biodiversity loss to farming rather than farming being part of or you know conventional quote unquote conventional farming, being part of a kind of wider economic system that is in all sorts of ways driving biodiversity loss, driving nature destruction. And so I, you know, yeah, I basically had ah a little bit of a social media exchange with George about these issues and then
00:06:15
Speaker
suggested that I might write an essay in response and the essay turned into the the short book saying no to a farm free future. So I think you know there is some sort of discontinuities within Georgia's position in regenesis that you know ultimately it's this kind of quest for a kind of nature friendly way of producing food that lands very much. I mean, you know he talks about other things, but ultimately lands very much on what is an implicitly urban kind of politically status quo vision grounded in ah in a techno fix, which is
00:06:52
Speaker
producing food using sort of manufactured microbial methods and i you know i'm not a biotech person on the social scientists by background and i kinda think that the crises to which is rightly pointing are ultimately social political economic cultural even spiritual crises and you know we can take any one thing like climate change energy futures biodiversity loss you know certain types of pollution and sort of try and figure out a technical way to to fix that problem. Ultimately, I think that's missing the point, that's missing what these crises are telling us, which is that we're getting our society, our politics, our economics wrong. So that's that's kind of the argument of the book. But I did look in some detail in the book at these microbial methods of producing food. and i mean
00:07:43
Speaker
what I didn't do is look in great detail at the nutritional side of it which I think is worrisome really in terms of you know since I published the book even about a year ago the whole idea of ultra processed food and you know how problematic some of these kinds of foods can be and certainly you know with some of the techniques that are being used there's all sorts of weird proteins that we don't really use know too much about and kind of organic plastics and things which I think are a bit of a worry but i didn't really talk about that so much in the book what i did focus on was the energy costs of producing these microbial foods which are very very high so in some ways it comes down to a debate about energy futures you know if you think that we're going to have
00:08:27
Speaker
a lot of clean green energy in the future then this route becomes more feasible but if you think that you know we're gonna face energy constraint. You know agriculture is one of the few sectors that isn't fundamentally dependent on fossil energy in the world today you know the main source of energy for agriculture is sunlight and so if instead we're using generated electricity to produce food.
00:08:51
Speaker
that adds a huge additional energy cost to society that we're not paying at the moment, even as we're struggling to decarbonize the the energy supply. So you know I think on sort of technical grounds, this is the wrong route to go down, but also on kind of cultural, economic, political grounds. and and And that's why I felt the need to to write the book, yeah you know partly because of as I say, you know, George has been this kind of radical green voice in the UK media, and a lot of people who don't necessarily know that much about the food and farming system will be like, Oh, well, if George says is a good thing to do, then, you know, we should do that, you know, people of goodwill. So I think his position has changed. And and it's part of a wider change, I think, whereas some of these
00:09:39
Speaker
crises, you know, begin to amp up, you know, as the proverbial hits the fan, people are sort of clutching on more and more, you know, across the political spectrum to these kind of techno fix ideas that I think ultimately are not going to serve us well. So, you know, I did my best in the short book to present an alternative perspective.
00:09:59
Speaker
Could you help us by painting a picture for us of what does this vision look like
Vision for Ecologically Appropriate Agriculture
00:10:05
Speaker
for you? What does a a more agrarian localist vision look like if we try to flesh it out? Because this is it's a podcast and if we can create something that like a visual image for people with George Monbiot. What I'm picturing is I'm seeing a city and I'm seeing just wilderness all around it. Maybe some big factories or the bio digester is going and they're they're pumping out fake meat and that's kind of the vision. it's It's crude and it should be more nuanced, but that's the crude vision. Can you give us something just offhand and similar to the critique that you just addressed? Maybe this is 1700s and we're producing food on small farm villages using all hand tools and we're plowing our fields with oxen.
00:10:47
Speaker
That's the image that comes to mind, but can you give us a more accurate vision of what you see and what you would like to see happen in the future? Well, yeah, I mean, that's obviously going to depend on where we're talking about, but I think ultimately it will look like the agriculture that was developed in a kind of pre-fossil fuel age. I mean, hopefully there will be some cheap, clean energy for us to use so that the amount of hand labour or draft animals is limited, although, you know, both of those have their place, I think. but
00:11:21
Speaker
you know In a sort of typical, you know where I live here in the west of England, we grow good grass here and there will be cattle-based agriculture, I think. um There's quite a lot of dairying here. you know Partly that was a modern thing in terms of producing dairy products to to to ship to London, but we do grow good grass. So I think relatively small scale dairy farming would be part of that vision.
00:11:48
Speaker
To some extent, I think we need to be producing more diverse whole foods. So lots of fruit, lots of vegetables, nuts. These are all things that, yeah you know, they tend to get commodified and turned into a kind of big scale sort of, you know, semi arable or highly mechanized types of farming in those particular parts of the world where, you you know, it can be done most advantageously, you know, on a kind of cost and profit basis. But you know historically fruit and veg were grown locally because they're sort of bulky and don't keep that well and so the localist vision is you know and more market gardens and more home gardens you know to some extent this is about breaking down the distinction between professional commercial growing and sort of amateur backyard growing so you you know this small town where I live Froome was historically a market town with a cattle market in the centre of town lots of agricultural buildings so it's about sort of rebuilding a settlement geography in which it's possible to produce ecologically appropriate diverse local whole foods and I know that you know starts to look like this kind of bucolic romantic vision but I think that whole sort of romantic critique is problematic really in the sense that yeah you know, we very readily romanticise the city, the sort of huge flows of capital and energy that are needed to keep that level of urbanism on the road. Really, this is about sort of energy futures, climate futures, feasible economic futures. So it may look a little bit like the kind of past agricultures that you're alluding to, but that's because those agricultures
00:13:32
Speaker
solved adequately problems of low energy, of producing local food, and sort of keeping populations fed. To paint kind of the picture for a listener maybe that's not super familiar with the ag system, and I'll take a little bit maybe of an American view here.
00:13:49
Speaker
When we talk of industrial agriculture today in America, basically that looks like millions of acres, typically in the Midwest, something like 96% of all farmland acreage, growing corn, soy, and wheat.
00:14:08
Speaker
that is then used 20% in ethanol, another 20 to 30% basically, that is shipped to a different part of the country, Iowa, but also the Southeast, where it's fed to animals that are in concentrated feedlot operations. So basically you have the entire Midwest just growing a monoculture of soy and corn that we then ship probably on trucks across the country.
00:14:33
Speaker
to feed to animals in these feedlots. You know, what you talk about in your book, which again is related to this energy efficiency, like farming the sunlight, it's this idea of putting animals back on the landscape. And animals are incredible in the sense that they can walk around and eat the grass that's growing naturally and turn it into a type of food that we can eat.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, something like 75% of global cropland is dominated by 10 crops. And you know you mentioned wheat and soy and corn and a few other legumes and um and and cereals. and And it's exactly that process that you described. I mean, there's a great book by the American historian William ah Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, where he talks about Chicago, that essentially pioneered exactly that system that you mentioned by, you know, essentially using grain, you know, importing wood from the north of Chicago and livestock, you know, from further west.
00:15:37
Speaker
developing those sort of systems and you know cold storage of railway cars you know shipping that to the big cities east and you know globally we have become very dependent on a small number of sort of global bread basket regions of which you know the US Midwest is a key example that has a lot of negative consequences economically for people it kind of undermines you know you know wherever you can produce these commodities most cheaply and like you say you know it's almost like Cranking out why more grain than we really need and then figuring out what you know what the hell do we do with all this stuff and you know how do we make it more profitable so yeah feeding it to livestock turning it into biofuels you know it's the kind of crazy way of organizing land use rather than you know having much more diverse locally cycle systems that don't actually you know use as much land.
00:16:29
Speaker
And these diverse local systems, I mean, you kind of talk about basically moving back towards a system where locally, if you're in good soil, you'd be growing a lot of different you know grains, probably oats, some wheat, you know some soy if you want some corn, and then you'd be integrating that with animals, and you would also have you know some local vegetable gardens.
00:16:51
Speaker
That looks a lot like a traditional system, but I mean, it doesn't mean that we need to go back to what it looked like 200 years ago. We can certainly, I would think, adapt technology where useful and appropriate to make it slightly more efficient, too. But it seems like it's more about working with nature versus against nature. It's like looking at how does ecology function and then how can we harness appropriate technology to capitalize on and on that and the most efficient way or I don't know if efficient is the right word but. Well it's interesting you mentioned efficiency because i think you know that's part of a problem in this whole debate is that people focus on efficiency rather than cost and then the metrics can be quite weird you know so you can sort of say well what's how can we sort of. improve the efficiency of producing a kilo of protein per unit of greenhouse gas emitted. But it once you start talking about livestock as a kilo of protein, you're kind of missing the point that the agroecological vision is that livestock
00:17:55
Speaker
The most important function they have is as kind of ecological vectors on the farm. You know, they're doing an awful lot of ecological work that otherwise has to be done either by people or by machines that has its own costs. And so the idea is that, yeah, you know, you get meat or milk or, you know, many other useful products from livestock, including the manure, including grazing and the, you know, the way that their natural behaviors then Are sort of integrated into the sort of structures of the farm year and so it's thinking in terms of those you know kind of multiplying those beneficial ecological cycles and then yeah hopefully getting some food you know getting some some meat some milk fiber or whatever.
00:18:39
Speaker
from the livestock, but it's once you get into that kind of how can we most efficiently produce protein you know from this animal and then compare it to other kinds of proteins or or whatever, it's that kind of mindset that's problematic. and then you know Improving efficiency is a good thing to do, but first you have to decide what your aims are, you know what your system parameters are, and it's that deciding what your system parameters are that's the kind of key thing that sometimes goes missing in these debates.
Reevaluating Efficiency Metrics in Agriculture
00:19:11
Speaker
If we're saying we want to have the most energy efficiency, the least number of calories in to get a calorie out, then we should look to the way that agriculture has been done traditionally up until the last one or 200 years. If we're looking at the least amount of labor input to get a calorie out, then that looks very different, especially in in in the context where we have access to a lot of energy.
00:19:34
Speaker
if we're looking at the least amount of greenhouse gases to get a calorie out. Again, it's looking differently. And then do we even want to have our metric be, do we want just calories out or do we want high quality bioavailable nutrients that humans can use? We produce currently more than enough calories to feed everyone in the world, but do we have the quality of food, quality of food overall has suffered?
00:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, right, right. It's useful to think about that in terms of the manufactured food idea. So the agroecological approach, say, is you use you know you've you've got sunlight, which is a zero carbon, zero cost input, but it's diffuse. And that's why historically you know farming you know it has to be diffuse and and farmers are spread around the countryside.
00:20:21
Speaker
but yeah zero carbon zero cost it produces grass or crops you know the livestock eat the grass and then that produces your product whereas with the manufactured food you know there are these whole sets of intermediate steps where maybe you have pv panels that capture the sunlight that produce electricity and you know there's an enormous amount of sort of technical input into that to sort of get the electricity out from that system. You use the electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, you feed the hydrogen and oxygen and a bunch of other things to bacteria
00:20:58
Speaker
in a steel bioreact and then you get this sort of slurry that you then have to filter and process and then you get your your protein at the end of that process. And what you can show is that potentially you can produce more protein per hectare using that microbial process than you can say with soil certainly than with cattle but you're not really comparing like with like um and there are so many other costs going into that system so it's a complete kind of mindset change of not necessarily looking at protein per hectare
00:21:32
Speaker
Or if you do that, you know, we can get we can sort of take a deep dive into the sort of nerdy aspects of that and it gets a lot more complicated anyway. But it's not really looking at that. It's looking at you know what our local community needs for food and fiber. And that's where that kind of much greater diversity comes in, not maximizing the production of cheap commodity crops that, you know, not being driven by profit.
00:22:00
Speaker
and but by sort of local food needs. and you know It just ends up with a whole different set of questions. It can be hard to have these conversations because it's ships passing in the night, people just starting from different assumptions you know exactly along the lines that you described.
00:22:16
Speaker
And I think that's a really good point you make there. And that was something I was thinking as I was reading your book, is you go to great lengths to kind of show how you know just even using science and data, George Monbiot's claims around you know this kind of lab-grown meat future doesn't really pan out. like It would take a lot of energy, basically.
00:22:36
Speaker
But I couldn't help but wonder, is this really a debate that can be won with facts and data and science? Or is this like a a kind of bigger question around what are our values and and what do we see as modernity and progress?
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think it's totally a values question really, but I mean, this is one of the problems with the whole kind of eco-modernist approach. It kind of tells people what they want to hear, which is that, look, you know, we've got these problems with climate change or biodiversity loss or or whatever, but you know, there are smart people who are working on this. We've got these technical solutions. So, you know, you can just carry on, do your job, go to the store, it'll all be okay.
00:23:23
Speaker
I guess it's a harder sell, my kind of position, which is this's not going to be okay carrying on along those lines. And we don't necessarily have the technical solutions, but the sort of the science and the maths and the data, they are important, I think. But, you know, one of the problems I've found, you know, the, the result of writing that book, I think I showed conclusively that some of the figures that are banded around in the, in the literature about microbial food.
00:23:50
Speaker
in terms of energy costs are wrong. you know It's one of these areas where you know it's like this new technology people wanting to attract um finance you know and and it's sort of it all sounds very exciting and and you know disruptive new food technology. so there's a lot of so and It can be hard to kind of sort the you know chaff from the grain really, but when you know looking looking at the the data that was presented, I worked through it and and found that actually the energy costs of these microbial techniques are much higher than you will see standard figures banded around in the literature. So I kind of went through that in some detail in in my writing and it kind of just gets ignored and swept aside. you know And that's why I think you as yeah I agree with you that ultimately it's about values. you know you know There is a place, you know it's good for people to spend some time talking about these details, but it's almost like that's not what
00:24:49
Speaker
that's not what we're really arguing about we we are really arguing about values and the likely future and i understand how if you do step away from that echo modernist vision you know which is about urbanism which you know we're a very urbanized planet is about.
00:25:05
Speaker
somehow maintaining high energy but without fossil fuels, you know, how do we do that? These kind of techie sounding answers are appealing because it kind of rescues the status quo and if you can't do that we need to have a much more difficult political conversations about things like access to land inequality and you know who gets to make these kinds of decisions, who gets to farm, you know, what kinds of food can we realistically produce but ultimately those are the kinds of conversations I think we need to be having because the ecomodernist vision is not convincing really on on technical grounds but also in terms of the bigger geopolitics and and economics of it you know just sort of trying to maintain this kind of global growth engine and and like existing centers of power you know I don't think it's a ah good long-term bet so it it sort of gets away from those values questions even at the political and economic level let alone the sort of technical claims about the possibilities for preserving a high energy, highly urbanized sort of global human
Choosing Agrarian Localism as a Lifestyle
00:26:12
Speaker
ecology. Chris, can I put something to you and see what your reaction is? As I read through the book, I had to come to the conclusion that for me, what I want to see is I want to see an agrarian localist future, even if there's no energy descent, because I believe that for at least for many people,
00:26:33
Speaker
an agrarian localist's livelihood and lifestyle is better for us as humans. And I don't want to prescribe that for everyone, but for me and for a lot of people that I know that I work with, that I'm friends with, that's what we want to see for ourselves. That's the kind of livelihood that we want to be able to access. And we don't want to be locked away in cities. We don't want to be devoid of nature, or even if we are able to go for a walk in the park in in a natural area. We want to have our hands dirty, we want to have our feet in the soil, we want to be participating with the natural world, with being able to produce our own food. I think there's an environmental crisis that we're engaging with, but there's also a human and psychological crisis where people are disconnected from the land, we're disconnected from communities, and we're even disconnected from our very own bodies.
00:27:28
Speaker
and our ability to produce our own food. There's real psychological and ah breakup of community that happens because of that. So in my mind, whether there's an energy or descent or not, we want I want to find a way to get more people onto the land to develop and regain that connection to land, regain connection to each other and regain sovereignty and health of our own physical bodies as well. So I'm curious what you think of that.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think, you know, one of the problems is there's a kind of a narrative coming from the kind of movers and shakers, you know, a sort of top down narrative that nobody wants to farm anymore. And we're sort of on this route to urbanism and industrialism and so on. And I think You know, that's a narrative that sort of made sense maybe 100 years ago. It doesn't really make sense anymore. It doesn't make sense partly because I think it's not feasible to continue those kind of levels of economic growth and industrialization and urbanization that we've historically seen. But also I think it doesn't make sense, as you say, because it's increasingly not really what people want. And if you sort of get behind that sort of top-down mainstream narrative. As you say, so many people do want to connect with food production, connect with local agriculture, connect with the ability to to access land. And you know in a way, I think the problem is the sort of biodiversity side of it can be addressed by that, not even necessarily by people caring all that much. directly about nature, but you know basically the wealthier you are and the more that you are alienated from local ecological cycles and drawing down on resources that are serving a you know a very highly commodified, industrialised and implicitly urbanised lifestyle, the more negative the impact generally on the wild things, on on nature. so I completely agree that you know even absenting these these other issues, people are ah drawn yeah to more local and more agrarian ways of life. I mean i think there's the sort of residue of you know the idea of lack of political agency, you know the idea of being a sort of peasant who's sort of under the thumb of of a kind of aristocratic lord that sort of partly still kind of drives that that narrative. But it's ah it's an old narrative that no longer is really fit for purpose, I think, in the in the modern world. I mean, you know people basically go where they can find peace and prosperity, but that's often driven and and ah
00:30:13
Speaker
you You know, historically that has in recent times often been to urban places and to sort of manufacturing jobs that can generate more economic growth. But there are limits to that process. And increasingly, I think we'll see peace and prosperity being rural and being agrarian. And it's, you know, it's a matter of sort of I think the policymakers and the decision makers catching up to that and trying to make that happen in kind of good planned ways rather than it happening by default in chaotic ways. But you know there's part of that process of urbanism and industrial development has been pretty coercive, pretty colonial. you know it's It's been about people being removed from the land and that's something I talk about a little bit in the book that what I call the ideology of agricultural improvement
00:31:02
Speaker
and I think yeah there's ah there's a long history of this. I mean i was um i mentioned the talk I did with Carwin the other day. We were talking about the Doomsday Book in in England you know when the Normans invaded in 1066. It's like this classic colonial document of agricultural improvement, which is, you know let's do a census of the whole country and see how much is being produced and then see if we can produce more you know that we can then appropriate as the colonial elite. and Very often,
00:31:31
Speaker
through history this is presented as a positive thing it's pro-poor you know we're producing more food we're feeding more people this is good for people people don't want to be poor struggling farmers and you know there's there's definitely issues around poverty and agrarianism globally but in many ways that is driven by that process of delocalization and and sort of industrial supply chains that we've talked about that kind of hollows out and impoverishes local farming cultures. And and to some extent, you're sort of seeing that now where, you know, the profit motive makes farming as ah as a kind of commercial proposition so impossible really that people are coming around to, well, I'll feed my family, I'll feed my community. And I think, you know, there is
00:32:19
Speaker
the possibility for agrarian renewal there. So yeah, I completely agree with you. I mean, I think this is going to arise anyway because of biophysical constraints, but in terms of cultural values and lifestyle possibilities, health and benefiting nature, it you know it would be great if it happened anyway. yeah Yeah, I think you make a really good point that you also mentioned in your book in the in the section around peasants and capital, but this idea that we think that you know we were these like backwards peasants grueling under our horrible everyday toil of the land and that you know we were gradually emancipated into this
00:33:01
Speaker
freeing urban lifestyle, but like like you point out with the whole history around kind of land enc closure and and kind of dispossession that happened obviously in the UK and then across the world, that was potentially never what people wanted.
00:33:17
Speaker
Right, yeah. I mean, it's it's complicated because like a lot of these things, there's a grain of truth in the narrative. you know I'm certainly not saying that there was never sort of exploitation of peasants and agrarian workers, but it is a modernist narrative that that has its limits that you know everyone sort of gratefully down tools and and and move to the city. and But you know also in as much as that was true, i don't generally it's not true anymore. you know The manufacturing industry was able to sort of generate high levels of economic growth for a period. And then you know's obviously there's the whole debate about the geopolitics of it in recent times and offshoring and you know the
00:33:58
Speaker
sort of the the the movement of manufacturing to to China and and so on. And now manufacturing is in that kind of in the same position that we are with agriculture of overproduction. you know We're sort of locked into this cycle of trying to endlessly generate you know economic growth and and more profit. And ultimately that becomes you know this endless sort of seeking of frontiers. I mean, obviously there's you know billionaires now trying to sort of head off into outer space to ah to sort of you know sort of push the cycle off planetary limits you know but that's where i think this counter narrative starts to have traction that ultimately that process.
00:34:38
Speaker
kind of can't go on has has reached limits. And yeah, it it hasn't benefited most people and increasingly is not benefiting most people. And there is a problematic basis to the agricultural improvement narrative that it you know is very often presented as benefiting people, getting them off the land, giving them a better life. and and you know There can be a grain of truth to that in some historical circumstances, but very often it's not really presenting people with a choice, forcing people off the land. and There's a difference between having more money in your pocket versus having you know a certain kind of quality of life
00:35:15
Speaker
which can be better and can be less environmentally destructive than being richer and sort of better off in in in certain narrowly defined terms. Again, you know these become very sort of abstruse technical debates about the nature of poverty and and so on. But ah ah you know as you were saying earlier, I think there's a sort of steady beat of different values um behind it. And you know it's good if we can get down to
Achieving Agrarian Localism Without an Energy Crisis
00:35:40
Speaker
them.
00:35:40
Speaker
Chris, I'm curious how you imagine a more agrarian localist future coming about, particularly who will lead that movement. Let's assume that there is no energy descent that really forces us into it, because if if there is a ah dramatic energy descent and all of a sudden the cost of energy is many, many times what it is now, we'll be forced into it in many ways. But if, let's say that we're not forced into it and we want to start working on that right now, who do you see taking leadership in it? Do you see political top down? Do you see more as individuals bottom up? I for one have a lot of trouble seeing it ever happening as ah a political top down where any kind of political leadership is going to lead this. I see it much more as
00:36:29
Speaker
needing to be organized because in many ways it's complex there's so many factors involved and it's long term so doing it as an individual seems unachievable for most individuals unless you're independently wealthy.
00:36:44
Speaker
Yeah, I'd go along with that. I mean, I am very skeptical that there will be any top-down political development. I mean, I think there might be as... I think there's kind of geopolitical issues are bubbling up throughout the world where I think governments, particularly in ah in the wealthy countries, haven't cared very much about food because it's you can sort of buy it on global markets. And I think that time is coming to an end. So I think there will be a kind of food security narrative that governments will start being more interested, which is not necessarily a good thing because I think they the the way they will get interested in local food may not be particularly a sort of enlightened one. So yeah, and I also agree with you that
00:37:29
Speaker
I mean you mentioned long term which i think is important you know this isn't gonna happen overnight and i think it's partly about it's partly about cultural change in the kind of stuff we were just talking about is partly i think more people are getting interested in food i mean i've noticed a lot more young people getting interested in farming and food production in a way that they weren't maybe sort of 10, 20 years ago. So it's partly that kind of cultural tipping point where people are actually like, no, I would like to you know have access to a garden. I would like to think about farming as ah as a career. But I think there's definitely a role for trying to do it in more structured ways. I mean, I think ah think there is a sort of movement of
00:38:14
Speaker
ah sort of localism and you know I guess there's things like the Strong Towns Movement in in the US s that I don't know much about, but I've heard about you know here in Froome where I live. In fact, this very room I'm sitting in is the genesis, partly the genesis of of the Flat Pack Democracy Movement or the Independent Town Council Movement in England.
00:38:36
Speaker
and interesting things going on at a sort of grassroots level politically in Wales and Scotland as well here. So I think people are getting more interested in their local places as food producing places. We've had this kind of concentration of capital and sort of massively inflating land and property see values. That has put quite a lot of money in the pockets of a lot of people who who care about their you know their local town and their local environment so i mean what i'd like to see is kind of local community investment really you know people using some of that accumulated capital which ultimately is not really a good way of organizing,
00:39:17
Speaker
land and land transfers and inheritance and actually developing land trusts and other other types of community-based vehicles that can then bring people, particularly young people who want to get into farming and and you know can't afford to buy a farm or can't afford local property values to to start managing that sort of intergenerational transfer in a different way. And likewise farmers, you know, I think there's a lot of relatively large scale farmers who kind of are thinking that the model that they have been largely forced to follow is reaching the end of the road and they, you know, they're thinking about inheritance and other ways of farming and trying to sort of
00:39:59
Speaker
Bring in new people stacking enterprises you know micro derrying market gardens you know instead of having big monocultural farm producing one or a handful of arable commodity crops you know starting to think more creatively about how you can have a more people farm skate with people doing diverse food production enterprises to serve local community so it's all starting from scratch you know getting the ball rolling is you know is is challenging but it is beginning to happen i think and it's that kind of thing that
00:40:34
Speaker
that will make a difference. And, but I think there will be, you know, shocks as well. You know, when COVID hit in my hometown of Froome, supermarkets suddenly ran out of fresh fruit and veg and our little local market garden, you know, suddenly had this huge spike of new customer queries. And I think that kind of thing is going to happen more and more. And it's going to start changing people's attitudes to where does my food come from? Who are the people that are producing it? How reliant are they? So, you know,
00:41:03
Speaker
There are grounds, I suppose, to be hopeful that you know these various different dimensions will come together, but you know it is from a low base you know in countries like the UK and I think the US where we are at the moment. Well, maybe to finish us off, you're a writer and professor, but you also are a farmer yourself.
Chris's Personal Farming Journey
00:41:23
Speaker
What drew you to become a farmer and and maybe like what's your favorite and least favorite part?
00:41:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not a professor anymore. I was ah an academic, but I gave that up sort of 20 odd years ago and um yeah was for a while a full-time veg grower. I've sort of got a bit drawn back into the writing of my own back, not with any academic affiliation.
00:41:46
Speaker
I mean, what drew me into it was kind of the issues we've been talking about, particularly the 1990s when climate change and energy futures and all this was getting more talked about. And I just kind of felt the food system was just a really key part of that. And I, you know, I felt like, well, you know, college professors come ten a penny away, but At least if you're growing some food, you can ah at least eat it. But, you know, I kind of got drawn back into the writing because maybe I was a bit naive. I was like, you know, I'll set up a little local farm, grow veg, sell it to people in town. They're going to love it. And, and, you know, they kind of have loved it. We've got some great customers, but ultimately the economics of that are not great. You know, and I'm like, why is it so hard to do this? You know, and that's sort of what drew me back into, into writing about it. I mean, the thing I love about it, I suppose is that.
00:42:36
Speaker
you know You are just drawn very tangibly into being a protagonist within nature. you know and and again I think that's something that's missing in terms of large-scale commodity farming. you know A key aspect of being a farmer is that you're producing for your household as well. It's not just producing you know, a single commodity to sell into the into the market. It's also producing, you know, a diverse livelihood for yourself. I mean, this morning before I came and did this podcast, I was cutting up logs, getting ready for the winter, you know, and that feels like you're you're actually sort of alive in nature, you know, with complex wildlife, you know, you've got sort of mosaic complexity in the landscape, you've got trees, you've got some crops, you've got grass, you've got
00:43:19
Speaker
sort of wild margins on the farm and you'll you know you're a part of all that. so So I like that. What I don't like I suppose is that it's very, you know, it is hard to make a living at it and it kind of draws you back into the Mainstream ways of doing things, you know, energy like fossil energy is cheap and human labor is dear. So, you know, the whole incentive of the system is, um yeah, you know, we'll use the tractor and I'll use the, you know, I'll use the cheap high energy way. And, and you know, we touched on that earlier. I'm not saying that's always bad. You know, doing everything by hand is pretty challenging. you
00:43:59
Speaker
you know the Amish example is a good one. It's about where are our limits, you know what kind of farm scape, what kind of human life do we want to build and you know how do we limit ourselves in order to do that before the limits get imposed on us anyway. So I guess the fact that it's so difficult for so for people to actually choose that lifestyle, partly in terms of the cost of land, which is massively overinflated and partly the poor returns to to farming of all kinds really certainly to things like small-scale veg growing you know that that's a problem and that that's what we need to tackle and not with these kind of you know fancy techno fixes but with more grounded approaches to food and to the sort of economy ah of which it's a part.
00:44:44
Speaker
and Great. Thank you very much, Chris. And I would really recommend that folks go out and find your work, find your writings, find your books. They're very well done. And you do a very good job of laying out your vision and laying out the vision of the future that but you want to see. And I think a lot of the people who are listening to this will also be very much wanting to see and wanting to be part of creating. ah So I highly recommend that folks find your books.
00:45:12
Speaker
and dive into those as they are great resources. Thanks. Yeah, I hope they do. And you know, I hope they help to be part of this movement that we really need to push forwards of diverse local ecologically appropriate agriculture. So yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast. Thank you very much for your time, Chris. And thank you for for all that you've done to cast a vision for this movement and bring leadership here. Thanks very much.
00:45:39
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice. As a new podcast, it's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod dot.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.