Six Steps Back to the Land

Why we need small mixed farms and millions more farmers

Colin Tudge

• Publisher: Green Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857841254
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Agricultura sostenible

Colin Tudge coined the expression "Enlightened Agriculture" to describe agriculture that is "expressly designed to provide everyone, everywhere, with food of the highest standard, nutritionally and gastronomically, without wrecking the rest of the world". In Six Steps Back to the Land, he explains how we can achieve that, and have truly sustainable, resilient and productive farms, looking at: why we need to rethink our approach to farming; how we can move to low-input mixed farms; how tightly-integrated farms employ many skilled people; dealing with the practicalities of this form of farming in today's world; and how we can get involved. Six Steps will inspire anyone to take an interest in our food chain and make a difference.

CHAPTER ONE

What is and what could be

Everyone, everywhere, could have plenty to eat. Farming could and should once again be seen as a desirable, enviable pursuit – assuming its rightful place at the centre of human affairs. As never before, humanity could be at peace with itself and with our fellow creatures and the biosphere at large. We, humanity, might all be looking forward, realistically and with equanimity, to the next million years – when our descendants might draw breath and contemplate the following million. All this is eminently achievable. All that now stands between us and a long and glorious future is seriously bad strategy based on false ideas that happen to be convenient to the people with the most power: ideas rooted in a debased ideology that puts short-term wealth and dominance above all else.

So as things stand the picture is far from promising. The United Nations is telling us that out of seven billion (7,000 million) people now on Earth, nearly one billion are chronically undernourished. Another one billion are chronically overnourished, or at least their diet has drifted too far from the physiological and microbiological comfort zone and makes them vulnerable to a catalogue of diet-related diseases including coronary heart disease, stroke, various cancers and, above all, diabetes. The World Health Organization tells us that the world population of diabetics is now around 350 million – well over twice the population not simply of Wales, or even of France, but of Russia. Obesity, the most obvious first sign of overnourishment, does not seem to be especially dangerous by itself but is associated with many conditions that are, including most of the above.

According to the UN one billion people now live in urban slums, which is almost one in three of the 3.5 billion who live in cities. Yet most of the world’s economic strategies, including those of agriculture, seem designed more or less deliberately to drive more people away from the countryside, for urbanization is seen as a sign of modernity and hence of progress. At the same time, biologists conservatively estimate that half our fellow species – say about four million out of an estimated eight million – are in imminent or at least realistic danger of extinction; the most dramatic mass extinction since the end of the dinosaur age, and certainly the most rapid of all time; and, directly or indirectly, agriculture is the main cause.

For good measure, the prevailing economic dogma of the past 30 years – that of the neoliberal, global, ‘free’ market – has demonstrably made the poor steadily poorer and the rich incomparably richer, while the middle classes have at best stood still. And overshadowing everything, threatening to make a nonsense of all our aspirations and dwarf our present ills, is global warming – now apparently on course to send the world’s climate into something resembling chaos perhaps within the next few decades.

All of the above results in large part from the way we farm, and distribute food. Present-day agriculture, or at least the kind that most governments perceive to be modern, and now support with their power and our money, is above all industrialized: high tech (technology based on modern science, as opposed to the kind that emerges from craft, like mediaeval windmills); high capital; and vast in scale. Some statistics, carefully selected, suggest that industrialized farming is a runaway success. Yields in favoured fields and from ‘elite’ (the most productive) animals exceed the wildest dreams even of 50 years ago and have been achieved with far less labour, which is seen as a prime measure of efficiency. (Official stats rarely deduct the cost of bankruptcy and unemployment, and the suicides that have so often resulted when farmers and their workers lose their jobs as Vandana Shiva discusses in The Vandana Shiva Reader [see Resources], or the collateral damage that results from over-simplified husbandry). Yet the global statistics tell us that for all its flashiness and hype, present-day agricultural strategy is failing – if, that it is, we are naive enough to suppose that the point of farming is to provide us all with good food and to take care of the rest of the world.

Those who preside over the status quo are wont to tell us that famines and malnutrition are inevitable, and are likely to get worse – but mainly through the fault of humanity; not because of misguided policy. According to the UN, the human population is on course to reach 9.5/10 billion by 2050, and individual expectations are rising too: in particular, the demand for meat worldwide has doubled over the past 50 years. Hence the idea, now virtually the dogma, which says that the world will need 50 per cent more food by 2050, well within the lifetime of people now in middle age, let alone of our children. Given that the collateral damage even from present-day farming is so enormous, dreams of a long and glorious future seem ridiculous. The appropriate response, one might reasonably feel, is panic.

Yet, as is so often the case, the official line is far from the truth. In some important respects it is the precise opposite of the truth. For while the UN demographers do indeed tell us that human numbers are on course to reach 9.5 and perhaps 10 billion, but they also say that the population should then level out. For the percentage increase has been steadily going down over the past 30 years and by 2050 it should reach zero – meaning there should be no further growth. So 9.5/10 billion is as high as numbers should ever get. If we can feed that many for a few decades, or possibly for a few centuries, without terminal damage to the Earth we’ll have cracked the food problem for evermore. Furthermore – one of many serendipities – the reasons for the levelling-off are nearly all benign: women choose to have fewer children as they achieve liberation and have more options in life, and as people gain greater access to contraception, and as medicine improves and infant mortality goes down, more and more people the world over have less and less reason to fear that their children might die in childhood, and so don’t feel the need to have one or two more for insurance.

There is one statistic, too, that turns all the official projections on their head. At the House of Commons on 15 March 2011, Hans Herren, president of the Millennium Institution, Washington DC and co-chair of the seminal 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report Agriculture at a Crossroads pointed out to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology that the world is currently producing an average of 4,600 kilocalories of food per person per day. Given that a high proportion of the world’s people are children, the average daily requirement is around 2,300 kcals per day – so we are producing twice as much food energy per head as we really need. In fact, said Professor Herren, ‘Right now we produce enough food for 14 billion people’. Fourteen billion is twice the present population and is 50 per cent more than the UN demographers predict will be the maximum. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) made the same point in its Trade and Environment Review for 2013, Wake Up Before it’s Too Late.

In truth, anyone can confirm Professor Herren’s assessment for themselves, using standard statistics that are readily available in standard texts and on the net. Thus according to The Composition of Foods, which was originally put together in 1940 by Elsie Widdowson and Robert McCance – and despite many revisions by various editors has been known ever since as ‘Widdowson and McCance’ – all cereals provide roughly 300 kcals per 100 grammes, and they also contain protein in roughly the proportion that healthy humans generally require. So 1 kg of cereal provides 3,000 kcals, plus adequate protein – which, as you can see from the preceding paragraph, is more than enough to keep a human being going for a day. Hence, one metric tonne of cereal – 1,000 kg – provides enough macronutrient (or at least, enough food energy and protein) to keep three people going for a year. Of course, human beings do not live by cereals alone, but right now we are simply talking about quantity. We can say that each of us requires the equivalent of a third of a tonne of cereal per year.

According to the website Statista, which brings together stats from 18,000 sources, the world as a whole produced 2.471 billion tonnes of cereal of all kinds in 2014-15. That is enough macronutrient for 2.47 x 3 = 7.4 billion people – more than the current world population. But the world also produces huge amounts of pulses, including soya, plus tubers such as potatoes and yams, plus oilseeds (soy, ground nuts, palm nuts, coconuts, rapeseed, olives, sunflowers and others) and sugar crops (cane and beet) which are heavy on calories, plus a large amount of meat that is heavy on protein. (Of course, if the meat is produced by feeding the animals with cereal and pulses, then that would detract from the total amount of cereal and pulses available for human beings. But if the meat is produced from grass or swill, with only small amounts of cereal or with none at all, then the meat adds to the human food supply). People also eat a significant amount of wild-caught fish (too much indeed). Add up all of that and, with the aid of Widdowson and McCance, we can see that cereals provide only about half of our total macronutrients.

So the total amount of energy and protein from all the world’s food sources is enough to feed 7.4 x 2 = 14+ billion people. We can argue details but we can readily see for ourselves that Hans Herren’s and UNCTAD’s figures are at least in the right ballpark. The much-bruited idea (it is now virtual dogma) that we need 50 per cent more food by 2050 very definitely is not. But although I have found noone in high places who disagrees with Hans Herren’s statistical analysis, and although it is so crucial, I have heard very few people in high places make the point, apart from Prof Herren himself. Meanwhile, the hype – that we need to produce 50 per cent more food by the middle of this century – continues unabated. Scientists in particular emphasize their respect for evidence, and politicians of late have been using the term ‘evidence-based policy’. Yet neither allows mere fact to get in the way of commercial expediency. The priority is to maximize wealth and power (just as I perceived was the case at the World Food Conference of 1974). This generalization applies across the board; not just in agriculture. The world cannot improve until people at large begin fully to appreciate that this is the case, and appoint new leaders (insofar as leaders are necessary) with quite different values and a quite different agenda.

In short, the reason why so many people now have too little to eat has almost nothing to do with our ability to grow food. It is caused by waste – much of it deliberately contrived, as discussed in chapter 3; by injustice; and in particular by the lack of food sovereignty (meaning that more and more people are losing control of their own food supply, as discussed below). The continuing emphasis on production – 50 per cent more by 2050 – has very little to do with need and almost everything to do with the perceived need to maximize wealth.

The specific claim that we need to grow more because people at large are demanding more and more meat at least needs serious scrutiny. Food preference, as has long been apparent, is determined at least as much by custom, fashion and general zeitgeist, as it is by innate predilection. Among other things, meat has been marketed with all possible vigour this past half-century, and marketing works, which is why so much is spent on it. ‘Demand’ is assessed retrospectively – it’s a reflection not of what people say they truly want, but of what, if the pressures are right, they can be persuaded to buy, and that is not the same thing at all. More on meat – the real reasons why ‘demand’ is growing – can be found in Chapter 2.

The present disasters cannot be blamed on the fecklessness and ignorance of humanity at large, as people in positions of influence are wont to suggest. We have not produced more children than the world can support. Neither should we blame the world’s farmers. They already produce enough for everyone for all time and they are not mere stick-in-the-muds, afraid of change and slow to respond to the clarion call of high technology. As individuals and as a species we could still be looking forward to a long and glorious future. World peace should not be beyond us. Personal fulfilment for all should be well within our grasp. The Armageddon mentality that now seems all-pervasive should seem absurd; our descendants could still be here in a million years, enjoying a far better relationship with our fellow species than we have now. The present shortcomings result largely, and in some cases entirely, from ill-directed strategy imposed by an elite, which either does not know what it is doing or does not have the world’s best interests at heart, and in either case is deeply reprehensible.

The root answer to our ills – not the whole answer, of course, but what lawyers call the sine qua non – is enlightened agriculture.

Enlightened Agriculture

The dream of a well-fed, well-tempered world may seem fanciful but in truth is eminently achievable; and if everyone was well fed, then everything else we might aspire to would become possible – not guaranteed, of course, but possible: world peace, far better health, equitable societies, personal fulfilment, a flourishing biosphere. We need only to design agriculture as if we really wanted to provide everyone with good food and take care of our fellow species. We need what I have been calling ‘enlightened agriculture’ aka ‘real farming’, defined informally but adequately as:

‘Farming that is expressly designed to provide everyone, everywhere, forever, with food of the highest quality, nutritionally and gastronomically, without wrecking the rest of the world.’

There are serendipities all along the way. Notably, enlightened agriculture is founded on just three simple ideas, all of which are widely acknowledged the world over. Of course, no one is suggesting – certainly not me – that by following any particular prescription we are bound to achieve all the outcomes we desire. This is the mistake of ideologues throughout the ages, both religious and secular, right-wing and left: ‘do as I say, and everything will turn out OK’. I do suggest, though, that as far as can now be seen, the component ideas of enlightened agriculture offer us the best chance of a long and agreeable future; and in an innately uncertain world, the best chance is the best we can hope for. It’s important, too, not to be pre-emptive as modern-day progressives certainly are, as they sweep aside tried and tested traditions to make way for the latest profitable wheeze. The precautionary principles must apply. We must always give ourselves time to change our minds and scope to change direction.

The essential ideas are:

First, the method of enlightened agriculture is agroecology – treating farms as ecosystems and agriculture as a whole as a serious, positive player in the global biosphere.

The second grand principle is that of food sovereignty – which means in essence that all peoples should have control over their own food supply.

Finally, to provide the framework, to ensure that what is done matches the real needs and aspirations of humanity, and is good for the world as a whole, we need economic democracy – which uses standard financial mechanisms of the kind traditionally favoured in the Western world to nurture societies that are just and convivial and to take care of the biosphere. Economic democracy achieves radical change by non-radical means: the judicious use of widely-acknowledged, conventional financial mechanisms for the benefit of humanity at large and of the biosphere. The good news is that we can achieve this without economic extremism, whether it be to ‘smash capitalism’ or to demonize socialism. Although the present global economy is way off course, it contains elements that can be put to good use, or could do with a little adaptation.

Yet there is a problem. The kinds of things that we need to do to ensure a long and pleasing future for humanity and our fellow creatures – somewhere between agreeable and glorious – are not on the agenda of the world’s present leadership. Despite the evidence all around us, those in power seem convinced that they are doing a good job, and that no one else could do it better or should be given the chance to try.

In truth, we don’t simply need a change of personnel, we need a change of mindset. In practice, if we truly care about the future – of ourselves, our children and our children’s children, and other people’s children and all our fellow creatures – then we, people at large, ordinary Joes, have to take matters into our own hands. We ourselves have to bring about the changes we want to see. The method is not to ask the powers that be, cap in hand, if they would kindly change their ways, which (at its worst) is the method of reform; nor to fight the status quo head on, which would be revolution, and would surely fail, with immense collateral damage; but simply to re-create the world we would like to see, in situ – which ca...