The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People : farming

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 11 points 1 year ago

On the topic of urban/rural divide I am thinking there is probably a third way to look at it. But yes, somewhat controversially I agree that most people should probably not repeasantize and rather live in cities for most of the time.

Sure cities come with some logistical problems regarding food supply and can't self-produce most of their food, but on most other metrics they are vastly more efficient and for the most part also more desirable places to live (which is why the percentage of urban inhabitants is constantly growing).

Basically I think only those directly involved in food production (or nature conservation) should permanently live in rural areas. But I also think there should be much more exchange between rural and urban areas, with urban inhabitants regularly staying in rural areas temporarily during summer season both for pleasure but also to help out with labour intensive harvesting tasks.

The latter probably needs some cultural shift though. Instead of getting cheap migrant labor (and treating them very badly) it needs to become more of a positively connotated thing for city inhabitants to go on "farm holidays" each year. I think this would not only help with the labour crunch in farms, but have a lot of positive knock down effects for all people involved, but of course it needs to be sufficiently mechanized to not become back breaking labour either.

[-] perestroika@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago

As a side note: there is another mode of work - construction of things outdoors - that is also difficult to handle in a dense urban area. Welding, cutting, grinding, even mere hammering - do any of those outdoors in a densely populated place, and you'll have annoyed neighbours - and their complaint about noise / light pollution is at least somewhat justified. Leave half-processed materials around, and there's a risk of someone taking them.

In a sparsely populated area, not much of a problem. :)

[-] TrismegistusMx@slrpnk.net -1 points 1 year ago

You talk a lot like an authoritarian for someone in a punk server.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 year ago

How so? I never implied forcing anyone, but rather that urbanisation is a long term mostly voluntary trend and that there is a need for a cultural shift away from alienating hyper-specialisation of the working age population (again obviously voluntarily, but that's not going to be very hard either I think).

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

urbanisation is a long term mostly voluntary trend

Is it? I think people experience very heavy economic pressures to move to urban areas, but so many of those available urban jobs are just bullshit jobs that don't need to exist. Almost 10% (from memory) of American GDP is financial services, for example. It's true that urban areas are more efficient by many metrics, but some of those metrics are also fundamentally capitalist.

Basically I think only those directly involved in food production (or nature conservation) should permanently live in rural areas.

Gonna have to disagree with you here. I live in a very rural community (1500 person town), and this just isn't how people work. People who grow food still need hospitals, grocery stores, mechanics, schools (including colleges--many farmers have degrees in farming), hardware stores, tractor parts stores, plumbers, and so on, but most importantly, all people need and deserve community.

In my opinion, viewing humans as somehow apart from nature, such that we should pave small areas of the earth and jam us all into them, is a symptom of the greater problem. We are animals. Animals rely on and are a part of nature. We've been pretending that we're not a part of nature for a while now, and that's been a real fucking mess. To me, that's the appeal of solarpunk, and how I found this community. Now more than ever, it's fundamental that we re-imagine the relationship between humans, nature, and technology into one that's symbiotic, not extractive.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gonna have to disagree with you here. I live in a very rural community (1500 person town), and this just isn’t how people work. People who grow food still need hospitals, grocery stores, mechanics, schools (including colleges–many farmers have degrees in farming), hardware stores, tractor parts stores, plumbers, and so on, but most importantly, all people need and deserve community.

I think this deserved a separate reply. First of all how many of these people actually work inside the community as opposed to just live there and drive to work somewhere else (or work remotely)? As least in densely populated Europe that is the majority of the people living in these small towns.

Furthermore, most if not all the examples you mentioned do not require them to be present in that small town and in fact rarely they are. They are usually only available in the nearest bigger city. This can be inconvenient at times for these villagers, but it is much more efficient and its is rather the transport of those goods and people that should be improved, so that those city services become easily available to the people that need them.

[-] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Wait, so on what scale of population do we peasants deserve a hospital and a college then? I'm really not sure I like this. Cities are fine for the folk who like them, but forcing all humans to live in them (even just in your mind) is inhumane. Some people want to live in cities, some people want to live in rural areas.

Right now, there are a series of insufferable folk who live in rural areas and do remote work. And small scale farming. And worse, ponies. Will I be re-urbanized in your utopia? How would you try to sell that to me? Am I supposed to like my new utopian city bullshit job? I have a remote one already and I don't like it, I wish it didn't exist, and that the poor PMs sending it to me from New York or Hong Kong could dedicate themselves to gardening or working in a (digital or physical) commons library and playing with their kids instead, thank you very much.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

No need to become defensive 😅

Obviously everyone deserves these things, but you can't expect them to exist in a 1500 inhabitant village. These kind of services have a natural catchment area and have always been located in cities.

As for your remote work in a rural area... Sure that's relatively nice now, and definitely better than commuting hours each day by car to some BS job, but try to take an honest assessment just how unsustainable and dependent on individualized car infrastructure such a luxury lifestyle is (sorry trolling a bit on that part 😜). If you were actually working in a field like agriculture... sure no way around it, but your BS remote job doesn't have to be in a rural area.

It might make individual sense right now due to low energy prices and comparatively much cheaper housing, but in reality you are externalizing a lot of environmental costs, which you would not as a city inhabitant living in an energy efficient apartment complex with services in walking distance and nearby public transport.

[-] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Puh, others have said most already with less words and I'm getting too frustrated here. You don't seem to be aware of how the rural landscape with all its functions feeds the city, and the many functions people have in this landscape, and the change the rural landscape is undergoing with internet being a thing and people not having to live at their place of work.

Nobody here wants that everybody lives in small scale farms, that is an intellectual debate between Mr. Monbiot and Mr.Smaje which I consider quite silly because urban/rural is a yes-and matter, not a 'people should' matter.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

Hmm, I think this is rather a communication problem, because I think I am very much aware, having grown up on a farm, worked for nearly a decade in something akin to agricultural extension services (but not exactly that) and are currently living in a 1500 inhabitant village.

But I am also painfully aware of just how unsustainable this kind of livestyle is, and honestly think that if you do not have a very good reason to be in that exact place (which I am slowly working towards personally), then it is worth considering for oneself if you are rather part of the problem and not part of the solution.

And looking around, I see very little awareness of this with rural inhabitants, who for the vast majority do not actually have a very rural lifestyle (except in regards to much higher than average resource use) and are at most indirectly involved in primary production.

[-] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe you are living in the wrong village - what would you classify as unsustainable? We might be talking about different things. I've just checked, and where I live has a somewhat similar size. The local town might have 2000 inhabitants, the villages around maybe average at around 200 people. There's a train station. There used to be several saw mills (I would like to see them return). Everybody is somehow connected to small scale agriculture, people keep sheep, goats, grow several field crops, tend home gardens, and tend forest land. The largest agricultural operations I see around here are poultry farms and berry plantations, but they are far and few between in desolate places and not destructive or disturbing in their current extension.

What we see around here: when too many people are forced out of small scale farming by political or economic reasons, the landscape starts to overgrow and wildfires start getting larger. One factor here is that a lot of the land around here is multifunctional land: my indulgent equines clear a few hectares of land which are covered with a wood crop currently, sheep and goat keep brush and brumble under control and clear fields after harvest. I also harvest several kilos of mushrooms and herbs every year just walking around the farm. The alternative to this setup: send some guys with machines to clear the land twice a year or risk the whole lot of trees burning down with a wildfire. And to do this service in an otherwise severely underpopulated landscape I only need an internet connection to get some cash in with my halftime remote job.

Some of these rural traditions and the ways different species interact to tend the landscape sustainably and efficiently have gotten lost (and in some places never really existed), but a lot of knowledge is still intact or can be recovered, and mixed with appropriate modern tech you can create a sustainable lifestyle that works in places where you cannot grow big grain crops - learning how to do this sustainably is another factor of what I am doing here. And I see that also the locals are aware of the challenges around water and climate change, and a lot of new ideas are coming in from locals returning from abroad and foreigners moving in. Of course there's idiots, like everywhere, but I don't think it's all lost. I don't know about island life, might be very different from this?

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

Well, that sounds like one of the few places where most people really are still working in agriculture and/or landscape conservation, which is great.

But that seems the rather the exception from the rule, at least as far as "developed" nations go. In the rural villages (in Europe) I had deeper insight to, maybe 10% of the population is still active in agriculture, and maybe another 20% indirectly in support services or landscape conservation. Some higher percentage do some small scale backyard farming, but really nothing on the level that would have much impact on the overall landscape.

The majority are rather working in jobs in the nearby towns (or are retired) and going there everyday by car. And driving long distances for the smallest of things is considered normal and "necessary".

Basically everything is highly dependant on fossil fuels, from transport to heating etc. And the houses are large and need loads of heating / AC due to bad insulation. I have seen an increase in solar-systems though, because of higher homeownership rates, but that's really insufficient compared to how much energy is wasted otherwise.

In the specific case where I currently live there is also loads of tourism, which adds to all that.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

These kind of services have a natural catchment area and have always been located in cities.

Uh... no. That is definitely wrong. There are absolutely rural hospitals...? I can think of several towns with fewer than 5,000 people and have a hospital. There's one some 10 miles from my house. There's also an agricultural college about 3 miles up the road from me.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The hospital might have been placed there by your government for political reasons and is most likely highly subsidized. Or are you maybe talking about a much smaller health center that refers most cases to an actual hospital in the nearest city?

An agricultural college can't be placed in a city for obvious reasons, but it very likely also has a catchment area of tens/hundreds of thousands of people, i.e. city sized, but is just placed somewhere where you can have study fields and so on.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

The hospital might have been placed there by your government for political reasons and is most likely highly subsidized. Or are you maybe talking about a much smaller health center that refers most cases to an actual hospital in the nearest city?

The hospital is over a hundred years old. It's a real hospital. It's not a big hospital, but it's where I went when a nail went through my hand and they had all the necessary scanners and a surgeon and stuff. I'm not sure why you'd just speculate otherwise? You consistently downplay the depth of rural communities and I find it frustrating.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 year ago

Well, I don't know the exact situation there, but generally speaking it is not viable to have a typical hospital in a community of just 5000 people. It just doesn't work out economically (even under ideal assumptions), which means other people must pay for it without benefitting from it, which is not exactly fair.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

It's not exactly fair in the same way that it's not exactly fair that we have to grow food for you guys in cities. We do things for each other because we're a society and being a society is cool.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

I disagree, there is nothing wrong with asking rural inhabitants to come to a nearby city to get treatment in a hospital, if that means that the service of this hospital can benefit people equally instead of it being monopolized by a small number of rural inhabitants.

And no one is forcing anyone to grow food, rural inhabitants are not enslaved by city dwellers.

But a society needs a certain amount of food and other resources for a given number of people, there is just no way around that if you don't want people to starve.

So what is your proposal to this? We can't continue as is, and moving all the city inhabitants to rural areas is clearly also not feasible.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

it is not viable to have a typical hospital in a community of just 5000 people.

Would they not have a hospital/emergency care facility that is appropriately sized to cater to the needs of that particular community? I don't really see how it would be a significant a drain on resources for a rural community to have that, unless I'm not accounting for something. And if that smaller hospital is adequate for the community, wouldn't that reduce the burden on the larger city hospital?

I could see them still being required to go to a larger city hospital for more unique problems that require specialists, but for more standard care, on the surface it seems like a local hospital would be a good thing to have, especially since there might be doctors that would prefer to live in a rural area anyway, which would cut down the energy needed for their own commute if they instead had to work in a city hospital.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe I am a bit more specific with the definition of "hospital".

Hospitals typically means 24/7 full care with a significant number of in house patients.

A larger health center might offer 24/7 emergency care and some ambulance services, but is typically not equipped and staffed to deal with anything other that short term ambulant care.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ah, I think definitions may be at the heart of the disagreements I've seen here. From what I've read just now, a health center in Europe and other places with universal healthcare is, as you say, a place with emergency care, but with only a small amount of beds available.

In the U.S., a health center is seemingly exclusively used to refer to a facility that cares for people without medical insurance or low-incomes, and does not relate to the size or capability of the facility.

So I think some of the other users here (if they're US based) may be getting the idea that when you say there shouldn't really be hospitals in rural areas, you're advocating for having no in-patient medical facilities in rural areas of any type, and to require anyone with any sort life-threatening or serious immediate medical problem to travel to a city to resolve it, since for us, 'hospital' is pretty much a catch-all term for anywhere that can perform serious medical procedures, where as non-serious issues (colds/flus, diagnoses, getting prescriptions) are handled by Clinics.

EDIT: We do have Urgent Care Centers though, which could be an equivalent to Health Centers? I'm not entirely sure, I haven't really used the medical system that much thankfully.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Hmm, yeah I can see how that could cause some miscommunication. But AFAIK this isn't only a European thing but also how the WHO classifies various types of health infrastructure.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think the real point of miscommunication between us is your concept of efficiency. Literally everything about our modern, western life is unsustainable, no matter where you live. Urban places are less inefficient, but they're still monstrously unsustainable. In the United States, even if you stop traveling, heating your home, and barely even eat, you still live unsustainably due to the government that operates a military on your behalf.

To actually live sustainably, we have to fundamentally reimagine society. I don't think it's at all obvious that this new society's rural communities need be unsustainable. In fact, I do think, as I said elsewhere, that any sustinable world is going to necessarily have more rural inhabitants, because the agricultural workforce will probably have to expand a lot, and probably be significantly collectivized, if we want to fix our food system.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's a definition thing. I am US based but I've actually spent much of my life in Europe and my entire family lives there. Rural hospitals are not urgent care centers or health clinics. They're smaller but they're 100% real hospitals in the sense that both Americans and Europeans (at least in Spanish) use that word. They have 24/7 emergency care and can deal with serious health problems. However, they're not all "trauma centers." Trauma centers are a network with different nodes of various "levels," and different hospitals are certified at different levels of trauma care. There's usually only a couple of "level 1 trauma centers" in a region.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think this deserved a separate reply. First of all how many of these people actually work inside the community as opposed to just live there and drive to work somewhere else (or work remotely)? As least in densely populated Europe that is the majority of the people living in these small towns.

First and foremost, I emphatically disagree in the strongest possible terms with your work-oriented concept of communities.

Second, and this is also a really, really important point, and this is actually something that often frustrates rural people about city people, but your life in a city requires a lot of material support from rural communities that city people tend to forget about.

In fact, virtually every single physical good in your life make has raw materials that come from a rural place. What is your house made of? Wood? That comes from rural loggers and sawmills. Brick? Gotta dig the clay from the soil. Concrete? That requires sand. Want to put in plumbing? The copper needs to get mined, along with any other metal, or things like coal. Glass? Silica is in the dirt. The gravel surrounding your foundation comes from blasting the sides of hills in rural communities. In most big cities, even the tap water comes from a relatively faraway rural community, oftentimes at great expense to rural communiites, and people need to live there to maintain it.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Sorry, I guess that came across the wrong way. I am also very much against defining a person's "value" through the work they do as some people seem to do. But that doesn't mean that the work they do shouldn't be relevant to the community they live in and that it doesn't make sense to combine workplace and habitat as far as possible.

As for the topic of resources needed to support cities... Obviously there is no denying that and I also don't think I have done that anywhere in this thread. The entire argument rests on this need and that you can't do without.

One of the points the author of the OP is trying to make is that the billions of city inhabitants can't all move into rural areas because of how relatively inefficient rural life is compared to city life when it comes to resource use.

So absolutely is there a need for some people to live in rural areas and produce these goods and their highly important efforts are undervalued in our society (like so many vital jobs...).

But people claiming that all would be well if we would all just move into rural areas and do small scale farming are sadly very misinformed or don't particularly care about other human beings.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

As for the topic of resources needed to support cities… Obviously there is no denying that and I also don’t think I have done that anywhere in this thread. The entire argument rests on this need and that you can’t do without.

How is this not denying it.

Basically I think only those directly involved in food production (or nature conservation) should permanently live in rural areas.

None of the things I listed are food or nature conservation.

But also, that world, in which only people directly involved with food live in rural places, fucking sucks for those people. Rural people deserve communities too, and they have them, because rural communities are actually full communities with depth and complexity (and real hospitals!). We don't only exist solely to serve the urban core with food and/or resources. Farmers are people, and all people deserve community.

I'm sorry if I sound annoyed, but I kinda am. You keep downplaying rural communities, like saying that the hospital without which I couldn't have typed this isn't a real hospital, or that most of the people who make my life worthwhile shouldn't live here. Like when I pointed out that to be able to farm necessitates the support of tradespeople and grocery stores and so on, you said they could just live in the city and commute here, and that maybe it's more inconvenient for the villagers, but it's more efficient -- those are my friends and family you're talking about. I want to see them not at our jobs, too. It's actually pretty patronizing to tell people that their communities should be dismantled to make them more efficient in how they serve the urban core, just like it's patronizing to assume we can't have real hospitals. We have real lawyers, too, and bars and bowling alleys and there's even a Chinese takeout place in my tiny ass town (though I admit that it sucks).

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago

I simplified a bit with the only food production, but otherwise please take my comments in the context of the OP article.

I am not saying that existing rural communities should be dismantled!

But like the author of the OP article I am frustrated with people claiming that their rural lifestyle is sustainable and "if just all people would do like us" there would be no problem, which is just very naive.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You are though. I really don't think you're doing it on purpose, but if you read what you're saying, you are.

But like the author of the OP article I am frustrated with people claiming that their rural lifestyle is sustainable and “if just all people would do like us” there would be no problem, which is just very naive.

On this, I wholeheartedly ~disagree~ agree.

EDIT: omfg, I'm so sorry, I am on mobile and somehow fat-fingered "disagree" instead of "agree"

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ok let's assume it would be feasible for a second and the 50 thousand or so people from the nearby city would all move into your rural area. Not only would that totally destroy your rural community that you are so protective off, but it would also require a lot more resources that what they currently use, and that is already unsustainable. So what exactly is your proposal then? Just let these 50 thousand people starve to death?

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

(I'm going to answer both comments here)

I don't know why on earth you think I'm arguing for everyone to move to rural areas.

I propose the abolition of capitalism, along with the abolition of markets, to be replaced with democratic planning, not, like we have now, an economy premised on one dollar one vote, in which the wealthy decide what we do. I want a society that looks something like "from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs," a classless, stateless society, in which people can live in rural places or urban areas, and we work together to make both sustainable, healthy, and pleasant.

It's a big dream. I don't expect to see it in my lifetime, but I also know that in my lifetime, the climate crisis is coming, and things are going to change whether we want it to or not. I think it's worth dreaming the dream, and telling other people about it. I hope that the dream can influence the decisions we make when change is forced upon us.

But it's also not just a dream. I am a member of research collectives and academic groups that are actively working on democratic planning. I founded a worker cooperative. I farm cooperatively with other people, too. I try to make the dream real in small ways, and I hope other people do too, because if we all do it, then it becomes real in big ways, and maybe things won't be as bad as they look like they're going to be.

That's what attracts me to solarpunk, and why I'm here.. I love the dream it embodies, with its unabashed utopian aesthetic.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Also omg I’m so sorry, I am on mobile and somehow fat-fingered “disagree” instead of “agree” lmfao.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Lol, ok never mind then 🤭

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

There might be economic pressures, but all in all the pull factors of urbanization seem to dominate. Sure, some of the jobs are bullshit, but people by and large prefer them over farming jobs. Part of that is of course cultural and I think we really need to make agricultural jobs more attractive to young people, but in the end it is up to them to decide, and currently most seem to prefer city life.

As for a symbiotic relationship, sure I absolutely agree! However that symbiosis will have to take a vastly different shape than nostalgic patterns of a largely imagined past that most people would probably hate if really reestablished. And cities are not incompatible with the idea of symbiosis with nature, in fact given the total population we already have, they will likely have to play a central role in it.

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[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

That was really good, even if I'm missing some context. We on the left honestly have a blind spot for what global food production actually entails. I live on a small, previously abandoned farm that I've been slowly fixing up, getting it to at least do something, and that pretty tiny exposure to trying to make food beyond the scale of a garden has rocked my goddamn fucking world as to the politics of food.

You often see leftists very confident that going vegan is the main (or even only?) thing that we need to do to fix our food supply, and then on top of that, maybe we add some organic and permaculture or something, maybe with a dash of local first. Unfortunately, food is way more complicated than that, and we have basically no idea how to feed the entire Earth's population without heavy use of fossil fuels as both inputs and fuel, even if we all go vegan, no matter how much I'd personally love a local-first permaculture world where all our lawns are tomatoes or whatever.

If you're interested in this topic, Sarah Taber also writes about it a lot. She shares this essay's view on the dangers of food nostalgia, though she tends to focus on the American obsession with the family farm, which is actually an insanely inefficient and stupid way to farm (I can now personally attest to this), from both a modern and historical perspective.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, some interesting thoughts.

Going mostly vegan would definilty open a lot of land for other farm uses, both grazing land that could be converted to tree orchards and conventional agricultural fields currently used to grow maize silage, but I agree that it would not solve the fundamental issue of temporary food insecurity in many places.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

The thing with animal agriculture is that it's efficient in terms of capitalism. We are really good at growing corn and cutting hay with virtually no human labor, and then we can very cruelly stick all the animals in one giant torture lot to feed them. The perishable product comes out year round, so you can invest in an efficient and constant supply chain without a complex warehousing situation, and corn/hay/silage/whatever is easy to store.

I don't see any way to a sustainable, ecologically sound, less cruel food system within capitalism. It's going to involve a lot more human labor. Even if we want to eat mostly grass (all grains are grass) like the cows do, and, as mentioned in the OP, like our peasant ancestors did, which wasn't a particularly nutritious way of life, we still have to deal with the fundamentally unsustainable way we grow grains today: Spraying pesticides (including herbicides and insecticides) to literally kill everything but the special pesticide-resistant corn, and dumping petrochemicals that are nutritious to the corn itself but devastates the topsoil, and so on. Our farmlands today are functionally productive deserts.

In the US, we are functionally incapable of growing anything labor-intensive without migrant labor. Even where I live, in Vermont, with the most hippie dippy organic farms per capita going on, all our beloved orchards that aren't pick-your-own rely on seasonal Jamaican migrants, whose special visa status also includes artificially set wages by the federal government, otherwise it just wouldn't work. All our economically sustainable dairy operations rely on illegal migrant labor, because there is no dairy visa since it's not seasonal. Everyone I know who wants to farm has a job doing some sort of farm regulation thing instead, like organic certification, and they farm on the side, often barely breaking even -- all this while hunger, especially child hunger, is rapidly increasing in our area.

Basically, the entire thing is fucked.

[-] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago

Okay, I've read half way through before realizing that this is part of a fight (discussion?) between two prominent proponents of urbanism/tech and small-scale farming?

I know where my heart is - with the small scale farmers. However mentioning the heart would already disqualify me from this discussion.

I also know that I am 110% the well-fed food-nostalgist who has her imported coffee in the morning and her self-raised pork and home-grown veg at night. Why? Because that's how far I manage to go with my skillset to keep at least some of traditional knowledge alive.

I think there is something deeply dishonest in the numbers he presents - for one, he mentions famines with political causes. Lets be honest - most of them are - so not small-scale farming was to blame, but colonization or insane top-down political decisions. Then, about how yields are calculated: how do you calculate the yield of a truly biodiverse farm? Between animals, vegetables, energy in form of wood, energy and nutrition in form of manure and mushrooms I might have over 50 species here, plus the ones I forage. Try and compare this to 'x tons of [crop] per ha'.

What we see in the numbers of famine and today's feeble attempts to recreate traditional farming is that colonization, urbanization and industry has caused an enormous loss of skills. With every displaced person who had to leave their family garden we lost a small patch of high density food landscape and the skills to tend it.

I also don't understand why Monbiot accuses people of wanting to go back in time. It's a bit unfair, because nobody really goes and 1 to 1 recreates the farming life of last century (unless you are in a cult or sth). We combine old and new, we use electricity, we get stuff in from elsewhere if we must. We actually start reconsidering which tech is worth using, and which does more damage than good.

Wanting to recover the traditional tech that was good and useful and got destroyed by industry or politics isn't hollow nostalgia. Wanting to shorten food transport chains where it's possible isn't promoting starvation.

Nah, I can see where Monbiot is coming from in some way. A lot of the homesteading nostalgia movement, especially when people are just starting out with it, is so naively optimistic, so arrogantly sure of itself while proposing their way as the only way ... But to reduce the small-scale farming movement to just this is dishonest and is not the discussion the green left (if such exists) should be having - but hey if those bros want to write whole books to fight each other let them do it.

TLDR: Tradition yes, tech also yes. Stop fighting dudes.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Regarding the famine topic: I understood that differently. I think he is saying that (previously quite common) famines are all but eradicated except for those caused by political issues like wars etc. I think this is true and easy to overlook as indeed there is a mostly well working global market to transport grain surplus over long distances (although the Ukraine war has shown it is more brittle than most people assumed).

Small scale farming does not really produce large quantities of grain surpluses that can be easily shipped around the world or stored in large emergency stocks.

In a way this is of course more efficient, because why produce such surpluses that outside of emergencies have no real use and need to be sold cheaply to be converted to industrial alcohol or fed to industrial livestock factory farms.

But the question is, what can replace those large grain producing farms as a stabilizing factor counteracting natural variability of regional food production? Sure, localized backyard farming helps a bit, but I think it is likely insufficient and mainly helps against malnutrition by supplementing main staples with additional food of higher nutritional value.

[-] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

You mention somewhere that you think people move to the city mostly because living conditions are better, I think that is only true in some cases. Sometimes, conditions in their rural home regions or homelands are made unliveable for political reasons, so people are forced into cities. Some people are being made promises about their possibilities in a city. Sometimes a mix of both. Not every rural family who ended up in a city ends up thriving.

I'm also still somewhat suspicious about big grain and the numbers presented. Are we really working with accurate numbers here, or are these numbers incidentally collected and published by big grain and their friends from the fossil fuel industry? I remember having read something about small farm producing a majority of the food, only to find out that it refers to these numbers from the World Economic Forum of all places, where a farm is considered small at under 200 hectares which is just plain ridiculous. The article then goes on about big almond/pistachio farmers, more of those super-food growing water wasters and landscape destroyers. So all these numbers are made up by somebody with one interest or another, and paper is patient, as we say in German.

I guess this whole discussion suffers from one enormous problem: both sides go on a lot (often based on a very blurry understanding of history) about 'people should', which is

decidedly un-anarchist and
causes proponents of the opposite opinion to fear that they will be re-peasanted/urbanized by force.

I believe the preference for rural/urban or any spot on the spectrum in between the two is diverse, and close to the heart/identity side of a person, maybe comparable to gender. At least it is like that for me. Moving out of the city and re-peasanting myself was a very early step of self-confirmation for me, and setting myself up with the right mix of rural and urban is important to me. If I was forced to live in a city (at least the currently available versions of cities) I would be considered mentally disabled very probably. And it being as clear and obvious as this for me meant it took me forever to understand that this didn't mean that living rural is 'the right thing to do'^TM^ , but that each person has their preferences, and that some people are happily and fully urban.

What I think we could do, instead of argueing what is better, is recognize the difference between these poles of the urban/rural spectrum and recognize they exist. I imagine, in a caricature of the real thing, some academically educated urban folk, all clean and sitting politely at a table, and a horde of mud-slinging peasants has their elbows perched on the other end, spitting while they speak and smelling funny, and hopefully some translator to aid the conversation. The challenge is in understanding where each side is coming from. The tendency of some young people to want to change their surroundings (like me from urban to rural, and the other way around for many kids who grew up rural) can help with providing a living bridge between the two 'cultures' (not sure what a friendly, but difference-affirming term could be?) in a solarpunk future, maybe.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Obviously rural areas need some people involved in agricultural production year round and I never said anything else.

But I do think that it is somewhat of a problem that the majority of the rural inhabitants have very little to do with any of that these days. Add to that the continuing encroachment of sprawling suburbs that destroy valuable farmland and you really have a set of extremely unsustainable living conditions only made possible due to the cheap supply of fossils fuels.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As for the numbers, sure big agriculture is good with lobbying governments, but the author of the OP article is a relatively well known environmentalist from the UK that did a lot of research on this for his recent book. I find it rather unlikely that these are fudged numbers from lobby firms.

But I also think people are misunderstanding what he mainly says. He doesn't say that relatively small scale farming can't on average feed the human population, but rather that our current model of resilience against the natural variability of food production (which is going to get much worse with climate change) is build on a massive overproduction of cheap grains that can be easily stored and shipped around the world.

Unless we want to face massive naturally induced famines again, we either need to maintain this model (which seems increasingly unlikely to be physically possible) or urgently find another way to improve food resilience, and small scale farming doesn't seem to be able to do so.

And on a side note: brutal conflicts between small scale farmers and nomadic people that are reacting to natural variability of food availability are almost as old as humanity itself, and really not a future I would like to see on a global scale.

Solarpunk Farming