What’s the real nature of our agricultural system? As this paper argues, “Agriculture was not designed to be sustainable.” It was designed to support colonial and later corporate empires. This is why it has always emphasized maximum commodity production.
That’s why this is true:
But those seeking to ensure food production in a post-oil future must first explicitly acknowledge that agriculture was never designed to be sustainable – not ecologically, not economically, and not socially sustainable, at least for primary producers. It would be a coincidence of miraculous proportions if agriculture would be sustainable, simply because it was designed to do things which are incompatible with sustainability. Thus, efforts to adjust, refine, or otherwise tweak contemporary agriculture to sustain productivity are starting from a flawed design.
Once again we see that reformism cannot work, because the problems we have are not the result of “abuses” of an otherwise sound system. We’d be trying to reform something which is structurally flawed. To promote on a large scale the kind of agriculture which does not, for example, export massive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus generating hideous environmental problems, is to promote not a reform but a revolutionary transformation.
You can’t render something sustainable which was designed to be unsustainable. As steady-state economy guru Herman Daly puts it, if something’s designed to be an airplane, you’re not going to be able to retrofit it as a helicopter in midflight. As they say, “You can’t get there from here.”
For agriculture, the goal is a transformation to post-oil production. It will have to be relocalized and decentralized. Food markets have to return to their natural local/regional basis. We’ll be unwinding much of the processing infrastructure. Organic production will be necessary but not sufficient, as not just farming inputs but the entire system of farming need to transform. We have tremendous work to do. Even basic research and education is in a parlous state. (Compare how Cuba was able to swiftly take advantage of longstanding research into organic production with minimal fossil fuel and other imported inputs when the collapse of the USSR cut off its oil subsidy. This was a perfect example of the right ideas already laying around, ready to be picked up. But from what I gather few outside Cuba have bothered to study what they’ve accomplished in the last 20 years.) And farmers will need to survive the entire revolutionary process.
This leads to the political implications of the transformation. Agronomy has proven that small and mid-size organic production is comparable to corporate monoculture under normal circumstances. Under conditions of adverse weather (which will become the norm as climate change progresses) organic outproduces corporate. And organic is in a far better position to maintain caloric output in the absence of cheap fossil fuels, while corporate production would immediately suffer catastrophic failure. So this establishes that we need tens of millions of small and midsize organic farms. But this cannot happen under the existing political and economic dispensation. Therefore, even if one is ideologically willing to buy into land propertarianism, on a practical level we can no longer afford such a luxury. If we want to continue eating post-oil, we have to move to a land dispensation based on food production stewardship. You will the end, you will the means.
I add that under such a dispensation, where anyone willing to work has access to the necessary land, we’ll achieve, for the first time in history, a society of fully employed autonomous and cooperative workers, all enjoying full control and use of what they produce. This economic democracy will in turn offer the most healthy environment for true political democracy to also finally come into its own.
Today’s agriculture is dependent upon the basic subsidies of cheap oil and environmental externalizations, as well as how the economically unviable farmers, really terminal sharecroppers, are carried by taxpayer subsidies. If any of these props fails, and they’ll all soon fail, the corporate system collapses.
Meanwhile, organic farmers receive almost nothing in return for the environmental (and sociopolitical) services they provide. On the contrary, they’re expected to fend for themselves amid the hostile depravity of the massively subsidized commodity system.
if every farmer had had to absorb all of the costs routinely externalized on farms today, many common practices would be unimaginable because they would be prohibitively expensive;
and if farmers were paid for all the downstream benefits society receives from ecologically sound management, such as clean air and water, robust and functional biodiversity, and food free of pharmaceuticals, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and human pathogens, many practices common on organic farms would be ubiquitous on conventional farms as well…..
Why Will Organic Become Mainstream? Organic will predominate in the future because:
Rising energy costs will preclude continued reliance upon energy-dependent inputs. Synthetic N alone currently accounts for about 40% of the energy budget of grain crops, encouraging a shift toward biological N fixation, but also toward less extreme levels of labile N.
The rising costs of ‘fixing symptoms’ created by ecologically dysfunctional production systems will demand less intrusive, more ecologically sound approaches. For example, the weeds promoted by simple crop rotations will be viewed as a symptom of an unsound system, rather than as a problem. The solution then is not just to kill the weeds which will just reappear next year, but to strategically design rotations and other practices to narrow the weed niche.
Organic practices are designed to internalize costs of production, reducing or eliminating the off-farm impacts objectionable to society.
To illustrate the concept of internalizing costs, stockless organic horticultural farmers surveyed by Clark and Maitland (2004) actually marketed hort crops from a given field just 4 years in 10.
In effect, they sacrificed hort crop income to grow hay, grain, or other service crops to add or scavenge N, suppress weeds and pests, and improve the soil. Organic practices are designed to internalize costs which are routinely externalized by conventional farming. Organic farmers do not ask society to absorb the cost of antibiotic resistant bacteria entering the food chain (Martinez, 2009) or endocrine-disruptor impacts on stream organisms (Orlando et al., 2009) or birth defects deriving from biocide use (Winchester et al., 2009).
As reviewed by MacRae et al. (2004), EU nations subsidize ecologically sound management exactly for this reason – to pay farmers for the extra costs incurred in order to internalize costs of production. Farmers are paid for societal services beyond the market-driven premium paid by individuals. Thus, ecologically sound management will be advantaged when input costs become prohibitive, and when society rejects the costs externalized by contemporary farming.
In addition to the practical truth of that, there’s another moral argument for the Land Recourse. Farmers, and particularly organic (or would-be organic) farmers have not been paid for their services. They’ve been robbed by the assaults and coercions of corporate agriculture. Therefore, farmers as a group are owed a vast reparation. The corporatized and otherwise enclosed land should square it. (This applies to every other kind of bankster and corporate crime; and it applies not just to practicing farmers but to all of us, insofar as we become the farmers/growers/relocalists civilization must produce.)
The wide adoption of organic production won’t depress yields even under today’s conditions, as the science has proven over and over:
When studied systematically, however, organic yields can be quite comparable to conventional yields, particularly after the 3-5 year transition interval. In MD, USDA researchers (Cavigelli et al. 2008) reported 6-year yields in corn, soy, and wheat under conventional (no-till and chisel plow) and organic management (2, 3, and 4 (+)-year rotations). Organic corn yield in the longest rotation was 24% lower than from conventional yield, an effect which was attributed largely to insufficient N and weed control issues (73 and 23% of yield reduction, respectively). Organic soy yield was 16% lower than conventional, but wheat yield did not differ between systems.
After the transition interval, Pimentel et al. (2005) found no difference in corn yield or in soy yield between conventional and organic systems in a 21-year trial conducted in PA. Similarly, over a 9 year interval in Iowa, Delate et al. (2008) showed no significant difference in yield for corn, for soy, or for wheat yields when grown in conventional versus organic systems.
Clearly, organic management is able to provide on-farm N and pest control comparable to what is purchased off-farm in conventional systems. However, it must be noted that the longer rotations typical of organic management mean corn may be grown once in 5 or 7 years, compared to in alternate years in a typical corn-soy rotation.
Thus, total corn production in 10 years time will be much less in an organic system….
Furthermore, organic and low-input yields reportedly already surpass conventional yields in the Third World (Badgley et al. 2007). According to the UNEP-UNCTAD (2008), the issue in the third world is not ‘how to feed people’, but rather, ‘how to end poverty and hunger’. Organic farming is viewed there as an enabling or empowering vehicle for social change and development, not just a way of producing food. How you frame the question predetermines the range of possible answers. The answers to ‘how to end poverty and hunger’ are quite different from ‘how to feed the world’.
The lower corn production is a feature of greater overall food production, as most corn isn’t grown for human food, but goes into gas tanks, to sweeten junk food, and to provide feedstock for Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Replacing this complete waste of calories with sound farming methods will result in a greater net production of food for people. More on that below.
Like I said, all that referred to today’s circumstance of still relatively cheap oil and phosphorus, as well as the temporary zombification of the depleted soil with synthetic fertilizers. But none of these conditions will hold for long. We’re on Peak Oil’s “bumpy plateau” of production, but within the next few years the production decline will begin in earnest. Peak Phosphorus also looms. And the soil cannot long withstand being constantly jolted into productivity with ever-increasing applications of synthfert. (The same dynamic prevails with pesticides and herbicides, both also rapidly hitting the wall of diminishing returns, both also dependent upon cheap fossil fuels.)
The answer to questions about feeding the world is clearly that corporate agriculture will soon be unable to do so, while only relocalized organic and defossilized agriculture will be physically able to do so. As said in the final sentences of the quote I gave above, the real question isn’t physical but political. Will Food Sovereignty win its political struggle? This will decide whether or not the world will continue to eat. Food Sovereignty is physically capable of feeding the world, and nothing else is. (And as always we should remember that if Food Sovereignty wins out, we’ll be putting vast amounts of arable but unproductively hoarded land into production.)
So only decentralized organic production can be sustainable. And what is sustainability? As the paper laments, the term hasn’t received a clear definition, and has been eroded and often denuded. (See here for Walmart’s “sustainability” scam, a typical example.)
For a rigorous definition, we can start with physical facts: A sustainable system will not be dependent upon fossil fuels or global distribution networks. Nor can it be dependent upon any other input which depends upon either of these. And while so far we’ve gotten away with trashing the environment, nature’s payback is gathering force, and we won’t skate much longer. Agriculture has to exist within nature. Therefore no agricultural system is sustainable if it flouts the ways of nature, let alone assails them. But our corporate agriculture does nothing but flout and assault. So corporate agriculture is unsustainable.
I’ll go further to say that since corporate agriculture is the result of inherent corporate logic, it follows that any agriculture within a corporatist context will be unsustainable. So corporations in themselves and any economic system based upon their logic cannot coexist with our continued ability to eat.
Therefore, while it’s not clear that the moral imperative of economic democracy is part of the definition of sustainability, we reach the same conclusion by the practical route. The physical sustenance of civilization depends upon the establishment of economic democracy, including the abolition of corporations.
(I’ll add that even if that weren’t true, even if practical sustainability could in theory coexist with economic tyranny, it would have no legitimacy unless it sought accord with the goal of destroying this tyranny. Nothing is legitimate other than within this moral context. I’d say any definition of anything which isn’t subsumed in the framework of seeking democracy becomes moot, since it would then be objectively pro-criminal and unworthy of humanity.)
So we have the basic definition and facts. But the picture isn’t yet complete, since organic inputs in themselves aren’t sufficient for the transformation we need. I mentioned above how it was irrelevant that organic would produce less corn over a ten year period, because we’ll need to transform much of our cereal based agriculture to something radically different anyway.
Today’s organic agriculture is still largely based on production for the global system, often on commodity crops, and therefore is part of the metabolic rift between the land and where the waste goes (and the fact that such “waste” exists at all). It’s not even remotely as bad as corporate agriculture, but it’s still in significant ways ”agriculture” as we know it. It’s not sustainable.
To complete the vision of how to feed the world, we need to apply the principle that agriculture must cooperate with nature, not fight it. In North America especially, this means moving away from large-seeded annuals like cereal commodity crops, and toward grassy perennials. This will be integrated into a system of rotating crops and pasturage.
[E]cologically sound agriculture – including organic agriculture – will necessarily rely less on annuals and more on perennials – with a central role for grass-fed livestock. And let me re-affirm that this does not mean less vegetables, as these account for barely 2% of arable land in ON. The problem is the predominance of large-seeded annual grains, which currently occupy over half of the arable land in ON, grown largely although not solely for livestock feed to enable the confinement industry.
Growing commodity annuals aggravates all the problems of soil nutrition, erosion, environmental toxicity, and the waste crises of the metabolic rift. Growing grasses where nature intends them to be grown will restore the natural balances and rebuild the soil. The grasses will be transformed into food for people through livestock grazing. This will more than make up for the foregone calories of cereal production, since the vast majority of what will be replaced wasn’t going to human food anyway. And since production of vegetable annuals takes up such a small portion of the land as it is, we’ll be able to maintain and increase fruit and vegetable production through sound crop rotation as part of the overall grass-based system.
So there’s a basic outline of where we need to go if we want to grow enough food to feed ourselves and if we want to establish democracy. The dual goal: We need to feed ourselves; and we need to feed ourselves. Nothing less will suffice, nothing less will be sustainable, for us physically as hominids, and for us politically as citizens and human beings.
Filed under: American Revolution, Climate Crisis, Corporatism, Food and Farms, Freedom, Globalization, Land Recourse, Peak Oil, Regulation Can't Work, Relocalization — Tags: factory farms
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