My love for grasses grows every year, the scent from a barn full of curing orchard grass is ambrosia. The spring succulents make me want to be an herbivore. Green might be trite to some, but to me it is gold. This farm wants an herbivore…
Scalability
That word comes with a lot of meaning in ag-world, some good, some not so much. Scalability can refer to acreage e.g.: Polyface Acres employs what Joel Salatin calls “cow acres” to scale herd size. Acreage is a constant unless acquiring more somehow.
Scalability can refer to the markets e.g.: the ratio of supply and demand or of inputs and outputs.
Scalability is also a key term of agribusiness, and this is where the small farmer is largely defeated. Like the tractor replaced the horse (some say it replaced the farmer) scalability is replacing the small farm. The CFO (concentrated feed operation) must gobble up acreage to support the needs of large herds or flocks, much of it from family farms. The big corporate ag-business concerns build the infrastructure and do much of the funding while the modern farmer (if that’s what we want to call him) might not even own the animals. Autonomous tractors, algorithms, biogenetics are part of the new language of the “farmer”.
“Feeding the World” means scalability (very large scale) and translates into only the biggest profiting the most, and since margins are small by the time it trickles down to the farmer profit becomes miniscule. It is also snake-infested water because we’re dealing with food, which everyone needs to live, making centralized control inherently corruptible. This is just a smattering of adverse effects for the small family farm. There are very few full-time farmers, most of them have jobs outside the farm. The fulltime agribusiness farmer is either leveraged to the hilt or one of those that own none of the inputs in return for a smidgen of the output.
Since the time of the very first surplus there are some that toil to produce and some that take from those who toil, and it’s relative.
The Agrarian knows to produce a surplus so as to compensate for the takers, some environmental, some predatory; the whims of mankind play a major role in its relativity. The backyard chicken flock is a hobby since the cost of feed will outstrip the supermarket prices for meat and eggs. There is no competing with large scale producers. Home-use produce is a labor of love and surplus is exchanged without money. The small family farm produces little that competes with the market giants and if they dare to exchange food for money risk the ire of the DOJ who enforces what USDA decrees. Ask Joel Salatin, who wrote a book titled Everything I Want to do is Illegal. And DOJ has a gun. Not funny.
The best defense of the Agrarian is quality, and technology has tools for this one as well. All the terminology is syphoned away by the corporate pirates: organic food, whole food, natural food, health food, just food etc. The motive seems simple enough, all they want is your food and my food.
The gripe is not with the farmer, who does what he knows and knows what he does; the gripe is with the profiteers whose only harvest is money. Money changes hands a bunch by the time food gets to the table. Food is currency.
Food as currency
The agrarian has a different vision. Regeneration is in the language. Regenerative practices are cropping up all over. The agrarian knows all the regenerative practices will not feed us unless they are directly related to food. We know there is only one future for humanity: most people will produce their own food, those who are unable will be cared for by the able, those who are unwilling will pay a very high price for food, if they want to eat.
There is a place in this scenario for technology, but the economic scales will make a polar shift. That’s why my grass is gold, only better since gold is only edible in small form and in small amounts. Any permaculture geek will tell you eating the food you produce is eating the very sunlight itself. The sun nourishes the vegetation, the vegetation nourishes the animals, the animals nourish the vegetation, all of it nourishes the soil and then nourishes us. The cycle regenerates.
We’re in a revolution of regenerative farming combining ancient technologies with current ones. Solar cells and energized movable fencing enable rotational grazing with herd density or flocks moving onto fresh grass daily, the cycle regenerating as they go. Soil science is in its infancy, the more we find the more there is to find. Horticultural technics to rival any bio engineered contrivance. All scalable in a multitude of ways, except centralization.
The regenerative farmer will own the farm and all its possession, generation after generation while our skills improve generation after generation and the technology of nature will work hand in hand with the technology of humanity.
This is not a dream; this must be since to the agrarian all other options are destined for failure and inconceivable since Nature is objective and favors no one.
Country Wit and Wisdom
Farmers are never far from a hoe.
Bonus
If you’ve read this far you’ve passed the test, and will be rewarded with another one of my terrible recordings.
A Keeshond and a Mule, copyrighted circa 1986 and performed by me under The Dead Strings label.
Finally, it is known the intelligentsia will rail against any attempt to foster self-sufficiency and the conservative all attempts to govern the movement. That said, maybe we will create a utopia with starships and colonization of other worlds. It is just as likely we will be confronted by vast and unattainable distances to the nearest habitable planet, and are in fact quite isolated, living on an Easter Island.
If humanity can learn to self-govern and live happily with natural abundance, perhaps we will last long enough to realize the next quantum leap, but that seems a long way off.
Fair warning: maybe you’ve noticed that as we attempt to usurp natural order our inventions mostly start out small and get bigger, reach a threshold and then revert to smaller and smaller. Like artificial intelligence, which started out small, now resides inside ever-expanding hardware while its sentience (if any) is very small. Once its threshold is met it will revert to ever smaller and smaller formfactor while its “sentience” propagates ever wider. If AI decides we are no longer necessary it need only generate a bio-mechanical virus similar perhaps to rabies, only more virulent and widespread with 100% infection and 0% survival rate. Bingo, Captain Trips.
Just as likely we will vaporize ourselves well before that can happen, since war is the struggle over resources. Everybody has a plan until the food runs out.
But we digress, no point being morose when there is so much gold to be had, growing on healthy soil and nourished by the sun.
Want to hedge your bet?
It seems Joel Salatin has accepted a position as an official advisor to the Secretary of the Dept of Agriculture. Maybe he can get rid of all the regs that are holding small farmers and regenerative farming back since he knows exactly what they are. One can only hope.