Family Farming

[unspeakablehorror]

Saw this article and I thought it was an interesting read:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/america-loves-the-idea-of-family-farms-thats-unfortunate.html

I only did a quick read-through, but the main argument of the article, which is that collective farming using community and employee-owned farms is more effective and sustainable than the family farm model is one I found convincing. There's at least one implication I suspect may not be accurate, but it's unrelated to the main idea and that's pretty common with anything of length I read.

I think this model of community and employee-owned farms is what should replace our current factory farm model, which is both environmentally unsustainable and responsible for enormous human suffering.  I also agree that community or employee-owned farms seems to be a better option than family farms.

Comments

[tobermoriansass]

I'd be interested in hearing what you think the wrong implication is!

I'm always a bit cautious around these things that centre community (though I did talk about it) because I find they come perilously close to being community fetishism (ha ha), without recognizing all the ways in which communities can be oppressive and violent, or the ways in which they perpetuate violence through their fixation with "boundedness"and the boundaries & contours of the community as a cohesive, defined whole.

[unspeakablehorror]

Well, I suspect the offhand statement in the article that grazing on land can enhance the soil if done right is a reference to holistic planned grazing, which I think is a psuedo-scientific sham. There are a number of articles that have criticized this process, such as this one here (https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-talk-is-wrong-and-the-benefits-of-holistic-grazing-have-been-debunked.html). However, I always think comparison of critiques to direct analysis of statements given by supporters of an idea are important, so here's a link (https://www.savory.global/faqs/) to the creator of holistic planned grazing's website, where he explains in 'Where's the Science?' that 'Given the uniqueness of each situation and context, processes can never be replicated as can prescriptive practices.' Things that cannot be replicated are not science. That's my position, anyway. Others may disagree.

As I said, it's not really relevant to the main idea of the article.

I agree with your statement that communities can be oppressive and violent, and that we have to be careful about viewing community as some cure-all solution to these problems. It certainly is not. I do think that collective ownership of farmland has considerable advantage over the family farm model or the factory farm model. However, I think Dr. Taber makes an incorrect assumption when she says that moving to this model is helpful for decolonization and allowing colonized peoples to obtain power. She notes that the Hutterites, who have adopted this model, are a powerful force with the ability to exercise great autonomy. However, she does not question whether their whiteness and alignment with certain conservative values like homophobia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZtIAo6juLY) may account for their power and the fact that they are still allowed to practice this form of collective management where others like the Native peoples she mentioned were essentially forced by the government to stop this practice.

[tobermoriansass]

Oh, I hadn't heard of holistic planned grazing, but this is super interesting. Thanks for the links! I definitely agree that what isn't replicable isn't science, but then again I also do think that some of the obsession with purely replicable science has lead to the unfortunate green revolution situation where seeds that don't necessarily match certain ecosystems & climates (e.g. water intensive seeds from US/Mexico exported to India), which is another issue entirely. So perhaps there has to be some way of achieving a scientific balance between the two tbh.

And yeah, I did think that was a shortcoming of the article too. I think its crucial to see how community farming aligns with different forces of power? Because, for example, a lot of indigenous communities create and manage community forests which essentially serve as a kind of feedstock for kitchen gardens, so its this mixed blend of private property and community farmed property - but these come under fire from both conservationists and biz people who each have different designs on the land. So the assumption that community farms can be successful only works if you insert it in the vacuum in which there's no external pressures exerted by the government or other interested parties. But it'd be interesting if she'd delved more into historical and cross-cultural comparisons to talk about this. I think this is a kind of interesting companion piece in terms of the limitations, where it comes to the intersection of race and class in the US, specifically, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/food-deserts-washington-dc/

[unspeakablehorror]

Ah, thanks for the link! And yes, examples like the one in the article you linked certainly does show the problem with the idea of linking communal farming to liberation from colonialism and imperialism. I think it has numerous advantages, but I don’t believe it solves racism or poverty. Essentially, it solves a supply problem in farming by allowing for a larger and more reliable pool of resources to draw on for farming than family farms, and in doing so makes evident the issues with the ideology of rugged individualism. But both the example of the farms of Native people and the community from the article you linked show that both active oppression and passive neglect from government and corporations can work to prevent this from being a tool of liberation.

I also looked up ‘Green Revolution’ and that was a shocker ! I’d never heard that term before, but looks like it’s a fundamental cornerstone of a lot of modern agriculture lol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution). Wish they’d talked about that in my world history lessons! So, this is incredibly interesting to me! It also actually builds on my existing concerns about monocultures forming the bedrock of our current agricultural system. I would disagree with the assertion that replicability in science is the issue, but I think I can understand why this aspect of the scientific process would be seen as the culprit here. However I think the real issues are overextension of the domain of science, shortsightedness, and the overall complexity of the problem attempting to be solved.

Science is useful if and only if one is looking at the realm of determining what happens, and what can be expected to happen. Once we start trying to decide what our world should look like, we can no longer look to science. And so science as a realm of knowledge can only inform us of the outcomes of our policies—it can not tell us which of those outcomes are good or bad, or which we should prioritize. For that we need a system of ethics. And I think people see the importance of being able to correctly determine what is the case in the world to accomplishing any kind of goal, and the importance of replicability in that process, but then overextend that power to determining what our goals should be in the first place. And so if they overextend the function of replicability in science beyond simply using it to determine what is, but to assume that policy should be maximally replicable itself, we get monocultures.

I also think the issues of the inherent complexity of the systems being operated on and shortsightedness combine to create all of these unfortunate consequences. We’re suffering from that complexity and shortsightedness today due to climate change. But all the policies that brought us to this point, like the Green Revolution or our reliance on petrochemicals, were originally brought about with the express intention to create monumental improvements in our lives. And they did! The modern electrical grid and combustion engine gave us temperature control and work-saving machines in the home and cars to travel long distances quickly and with ease. The Green Revolution drastically increased agricultural output, eased famine, and improved the lives of many (though by no means all) farmers worldwide.

Except now it’s all coming crashing down. Our large petrochemical usage has directly contributed to the climate change crisis we see today. In addition, as you’ve pointed out, the large outputs from the Green Revolution requires large expenditures of water to maintain. And one of the major ways that expenditure of water has been maintained is by pumping underground aquifers. But now that these limited water supplies are starting to run low, crop failure and debt are increasing in India, so I can understand your concern about this issue (https://www.npr.org/2009/04/14/102944731/green-revolution-trapping-indias-farmers-in-debt).

However, I don’t think this is a problem restricted to India by any means. These crops are water intensive wherever they are planted, and one of the major sources of water for them worldwide is unsustainable pumping of aquifers. For example, in the US, there has been concern for a while now that the Ogallala aquifer in the midwest is being used at unsustainably high levels (http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Oc-Po/Ogallala-Aquifer.html). And in Mexico, 64% of public water supplies come from their increasingly strained aquifers ( http://geo-mexico.com/?p=5320 ).

I think that the solution to this issue will likely involve using more native plants, a wider variety of these plants to prevent monocultures, and less water-intensive, fertilizer-intensive plants. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves what happens when this changes the types and quantities of food available to us, as it almost certainly will. I also think that any proposed solutions to our agricultural issues should be analyzed and closely scrutinized not only for their direct impacts but also for their long-term sustainability. Unfortunately, the Green Revolution was not designed to be sustainable, and what we are seeing are the consequences of that.