I'm glad he put it in terms of enclosure and made the distinction between productivity and competitiveness in global markets. I've heard of plenty of studies which conclude that small-scale mixed farming is far more productive per acre even on a calorie basis than modern machine + chemical agriculture. The difference is the amount of direct human (and animal) labour involved, as well as the twisted priorities of global capitalism. That's the whole point really: the enclosures exploited efficiency gains and marketisation of agriculture to put an end to the subsistence autonomy of land-based peasant cultures, and created the population of desperate landless people to work in the factories and become alienated city folk. Fossil fuels & mechanisation put this on steroids to the point where one old farmer plus an array of huge machines could do the work that it would have previously taken hundreds of people to do.
With this system failing the opportunity arises for re-ruralisation and the reversal of this process. Some, myself included, dream of this; for others it would be a nightmare, and it could well turn out that way if a form of neo-feudalism or outright slavery emerges. But then this type of coercion is generally a hallmark of highly centralised societies, with all the resources being channelled to a nonproductive imperial centre. If there is a move, however reluctant, towards decentralisation then it seems plausible that the coercion would dwindle over time. As ever the damage will be done by trying to maintain the system as it is rather than allowing the necessary changes to happen.
By Chris Smaje, originally published by Resilience.org
October 23, 2023
George Monbiot recently came out swinging for me in his article ‘The cruel fantasies of well-fed people’, concerning my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. Since that book in large part is a rejoinder to his own volume, Regenesis, I can hardly blame him for aiming a few blows. I just wish they hadn’t been quite so low.
Ideally, I’d have liked him to have given his readers a better idea of what my book really says, instead of flinging around wild accusations about Nazism, mass death and the like. But I guess it’s an achievement for a writer with a much smaller platform than him to have so obviously touched a nerve. Perhaps it suggests I got something right?
One thing I did get right is my critique of George’s energy figures for the manufactured bacterial food approach he espouses, but notably failed to mention in his essay. I finally wrested his source from him after a lot of foot-dragging on his part, and I believe I’ve now shown conclusively that the figure he cites in Regenesis of 16.7kWh/kg bacterial protein is wrong. The true figure is about four times higher, at least. I’ll spare the nerdy details (outlined further here), but basically I’ve shown what a lot of people always suspected – making food from bacteria using electricity in factories isn’t going to cut it as a mass global food strategy. Human feedlots
This matters because George wants to retain the world’s existing highly urbanized global settlement patterns, while leaving more room for nature, and cutting fossil fuels at the same time. I’m up for all that too, largely. But the things we want in life aren’t necessarily the things we get. George gives no indication of how urban demands for energy, food, water, materials and waste management can be met renewably in the long term. Bacterial food was the closest he came in his book to a cunning plan. It wasn’t much of one to start with, and it now turns out to be even less convincing.
It’s for reasons like this that I’ve argued the future of humanity is probably going to be largely rural. It’s not because I hate cities. George works himself up into a fine moral outrage at my description of cities as ‘human feedlots’. This coinage isn’t particularly original on my part, and it doesn’t imply condemnation of city dwellers any more than opposition to livestock feedlots is directed at the animals themselves. The analogy is biophysical. Cities, like feedlots, need to import food, water and other materials from afar, and they need to export or process their wastes. That requires high levels of energy and political stability. If the supply of either is disrupted, the inhabitants are in trouble. And that, I believe, is increasingly going to be the case.
Let’s go back to the energy costs of bacterial food. They’re so high because the process is energised by generated electricity rather than plain sunlight. Therein lies a hint as to why I think humanity’s future will probably be mostly rural, just as pre-fossil fuelled humanity’s past was. The energy from the sun is diffuse, so in the absence of a cheap energy bonanza like fossil fuels, people also need to spread out to capture it adequately and generate a livelihood. The ruralizing tyrant that George shakes his fist at in his essay isn’t so much me as the sun, which refuses to order its affairs for the benefit of modern urban humanity.
So George can rage all he likes at me for my supposedly cruel ideological fantasies of ruralism. It won’t make a jot of difference to the non-ideological reality of where the sunshine falls. I have no desire to force people to do anything or move anywhere against their will. But ultimately people go of their own accord when they can get away from misery and death and towards wellbeing and life. George’s essay is a bad case of shooting the messenger.
This is why I find the endless barbs about nostalgia, turning the clock back, bucolic idylls and what have you so much chaff. Whatever the downsides of premodern societies, they generally knew how to make a local livelihood, and they handed on a liveable world to their descendants. Present generations don’t seem to be doing a brilliant job on those fronts. Is it too much to ask that we get over ourselves just a bit and imagine we might be able to learn something from peoples who’ve figured out how to live low energy local lives?
I don’t think ruralization will be easy. I’ve discussed in my books the kind of class conflicts over access to land that are likely to arise in the future, and how people might try to create as best they can congenial and renewable small farm societies out of such conflicts. At the same time, it would be wrong to tell it only as a story of unrelenting difficulty. People in rural areas hollowed out by cruel histories of urbanisation often welcome newcomers willing to build their lives there. Here are the grounds for serious discussion about the future of energy, food, land and local politics that some people – still too few – are beginning to have. The more that present thought leaders ridicule even the very idea of ruralization, the greater the difficulties will be when it happens anyway.
The new enclosures
As some discussions start, others end. The new politics involves a slow unravelling of old left-right distinctions. Technocratic welfare capitalism of the kind George now favours has become mainstream on the erstwhile radical left, while the more embryonic politics of agrarian localism draws from ideas like civic republicanism and distributism which don’t easily fit familiar modern categories. Constructive discussion across this emerging divide is getting harder.
George’s response to my book is a case in point. If that’s all he’s willing to make of my analysis, then I don’t know how to move the conversation on. Meanwhile, the new politics of enclosure that George has come to espouse is turning into real, hard-edged political conflict on the ground, and I do know where I stand on that.
Politics of enclosure? Take a look at George’s essay, where he unwittingly makes the coming conflict plain. He says he doesn’t want to see any depopulation of the countryside, but he also says this:
Discussing his own, proudly low-yield production of wheat and potatoes, Chris states:
“there’s no point labouring for next to nothing on someone else’s behalf when you’ve already grown enough to eat for yourself.”
This is why farmers who do not share his worldview pursue higher yields: these yields make it economically worthwhile to produce staple foods that can be sold to other people. We should thank our lucky stars for such people.
If he’d read more carefully, he might have noticed that in the relevant part of my book (pp.75-6), I focus on prices and costs, not yields. I say nothing about the yields on our holding. Even if the per hectare (or, more aptly in our case, per square metre) yields we achieved were double those of large commercial farms, it wouldn’t be worth selling our wheat or potatoes on the open market, because of the low price relative to the scale of production – which is set by world market conditions.
So when George says that farmers who don’t share my worldview pursue higher yields, he isn’t specifying the real logic of their practice. They might pursue higher yields – and when they do, they almost invariably do it by applying more inputs like fertiliser and pesticides, which bring their own problems. People love Jack and the Beanstalk stories about unearned increase, but unfortunately there’s no golden goose in real life (not even in energy-guzzling bacterial bioreactors).
No, what the larger-scale commercial farmers who George is thanking are really pursuing, and have no option but to pursue in the modern global food system, is higher profit margins. There are many ways to attempt this – for example, increasing farm scale, increasing mechanization and fossil energy use, cutting jobs, increasing water use, increasing the use of ecocidal agrochemicals, grubbing out hedgerows and natural features of the landscape, finding new and more productive areas to establish agricultural land (and ejecting anyone living there who’s less profit-oriented). When George thanks yield-chasing farmers, what he’s really celebrating are the processes of agricultural ecocide, enclosure and human impoverishment in the modern food system that he rightly criticises in Regenesis.
This is the contradictory logic of his position. And this is how the new enclosures will pan out, just as the old ones did, when people with political power confuse ‘efficiency’ with market connection and cost, and don’t really care about who’s living on the land or why.
Perhaps I should add that I did, for a couple of years, grow potatoes commercially using my small tractor. But it was hard to compete on price with people growing them using bigger tractors in bigger fields, scaled to the size of the machinery. How odd to find myself arguing with George Monbiot against the trend towards mechanised gigantism on the land. Or off it – in the unlikely event that the ‘farm-free’ bacterial food he advocates takes off, the monopolistic tendencies would be greater still.
To put this another way, enclosure and the drive to accumulation have led to a global economy producing too much of the wrong kinds of crops at too low a price and producing too much poverty afflicting too many people who can’t afford to eat well, if at all. Producing even more of the wrong kinds of crops at even lower prices won’t solve either of these two problems.
So I daresay it’s true George doesn’t want to see any depopulation of the countryside. But he doesn’t notice how his politics means that what he wants probably isn’t what he’ll get. That will suit other political players, who are all too happy to depopulate the countryside for their own self-serving reasons. The return of the peasant
Still, the fact remains that small-scale farmers in their multitudes have clung to their holdings through the tumultuous politics of enclosure in modern times, and kept feeding their households and communities via local markets. The demise of the peasant has long been heralded, but it’s never arrived. If we’re to make it through the present meta-crisis, I believe it’ll be necessary to rebuild food systems around such dogged efforts. George positions me as a kind of dilettante, ‘well fed’, gentleman smallholder. No doubt I’m an easy target in that respect. But his scorn for what he’s called ‘neo-peasant bullshit’ can’t be separated as easily as he thinks from scorning ‘peasant bullshit’. Which isn’t quite such a good look, nor such a good historical punt.
Shortly before my book was published, I wrote an article called Five bad arguments against agrarian localism, predicting the kind of clichéd pushbacks it might get and saying that I wouldn’t engage with their silliness. Of these arguments, George’s essay scored an impressive 80 per cent. The only one that merits further scrutiny, if we drop the ‘mass death’ stuff for which he provides no real justification, is how to feed people (urban or rural) securely in the future.
Here, George makes the evidence-free assumption that agrarian localism isn’t up to the job. He used to be more nuanced. It’s an important debate, but there’s no reason to assume that transitioning toward ruralism and agrarian localism will cause more hunger than persevering with mass urbanism in these times of profound biophysical and geopolitical change.
The opposite seems more likely. Nobody knows whether a food system of whatever kind will be able to feed the world’s people long-term in the future, but a rich research literature descending from the likes of Ester Boserup has shown that small-scale, low input, local food systems can be enormously productive of diverse food on a per hectare basis over long periods. By contrast, there’s little evidence to suggest that today’s high-input global food commodity chains have equivalent historical resilience. Mysteries and passions
George’s essay raises numerous other points of contention. I’ll just mention one, concerning what I called in my book the ‘mysteries and passions’ of human culture. Here, George descends to rank falsehood in attributing to me the view that getting enough food is secondary to these passions, something I’ve certainly never said. But he presses on regardless: “I would say that having enough food is pretty damn primary. In any hierarchy of human needs it features close to the top”.
I feel no obligation to defend words I haven’t spoken, but it’s interesting to see where George’s arguments take him here – implicitly invoking the ‘hierarchy of needs’ associated with Abraham Maslow, a man who wrote that ideally the adage should be true that what’s good for General Motors is good for the United States, and what’s good for the United States is good for the world.
The ‘hierarchy of needs’ sounds plausible, but it’s not how any society ever actually constitutes itself – ‘first let’s organise food production to maximise yields and keep prices down, then we’ll sort out the music, religion, kin relations and all that stuff’. Food is important, it keeps us alive, but it’s not always more important than culture. The limiting case here is the fact that people are sometimes prepared to die for their commitments to cultural meaning, much to the bemusement of the kind of utilitarian ideologues who imagine consumers will happily eat bacterial protein as an alternative to meat once the former’s superior land use efficiency has been properly explained.
Food is a vital human need, whereas the hierarchy of needs that George invokes is a specific artefact of modern culture, reflecting our weird fetishism of the economic bottom line. Ironically, this has made food harder to come by for many people in modern times. Perhaps I’ll write elsewhere about George’s neo-Malthusian views on tackling hunger by growing more food and lowering its price. It’s a strategy that’s rarely worked because it misspecifies the problem.
George’s thinking on this point reflects the death spiral of modernist culture and its techno-solutionism: if only we could produce more food, more clean energy, more lithium batteries, more green hydrogen, more working capital, more whatever, then our problems at last will be over. I don’t think they will be, for various reasons – not least the fact that our problems, fundamentally, are cultural and spiritual, not technical. They’re problems about the need for a certain kind of more, and for the bottom line thinking that drives it.
In a tweet about the response to his critical essay about me, George writes “The overwhelming message has been “thank goodness this nonsense has been called out.”” Funnily enough, that’s also the overwhelming message that’s come back to me regarding my criticisms of his own thinking. Is there scope for debate across these echo chambers? I don’t know. By the rules of Godwin’s Law concerning Nazi comparisons in online argument, the debate has already concluded in my favour. In any case, I’m not sure there’s much to be gained by two old men angrily trying to best each other in the face of their shared impotence to solve the world’s problems. If there’s real regenesis, it’s happening elsewhere.
Indeed, I have faith in the ability of ordinary people to improvise the relationships that can see them through their day-to-day if they’re given half a chance. If there are ‘solutions’ to the meta-crisis, I think that’s where they’ll come from, not from magic foods pioneered by biotech companies with generous public funding, heralded by journalists looking for ways to save the world. There’s real work of transformative adaptation to do to rise to present challenges – unsung, grassroots and local. It’s time to forget fantasy narratives like Regenesis, and to forget conspiracy-tinged theories about shadowy environmentalist movements with formulas for mass death. It’s time to get on with building new local worlds.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Perhaps incorrectly, or even arrogantly, I’m anticipating that my soon-to-be-published book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future might elicit pushback from those unconvinced by its arguments for agrarian localism.
If it does, obviously that’s fine. It’s a polemical sort of book, so counterargument is only to be expected. But my hope is for thoughtful, engaged counterargument that’s worth discussing, and not the kind of dumbass dismissals of agrarian localism that are all too common (I’ve already seen a couple online in relation to my book, even though it’s not yet published).
Now, I’ve been writing about this topic for quite a while, and I apologise if what you read below sounds jaded or exasperated. But I thought it might be useful to collect together in one place the five main dumbass arguments that I won’t engage with and explain why I won’t engage with them. Mainly it’s because (1) they’re dumbass arguments, and (2) I’ve engaged with them so many times before. But I’ll try to give a flavour in this post as to why I don’t think they’re worth engaging with.
In subsequent posts, I aim to home in on some more worthwhile points of contention.
I should probably preface the below by stating, in case this isn’t clear, that I’m not projecting an agrarian localist future because I think it’s a nice lifestyle option that everyone should follow for fun. I’m projecting it because I don’t think we have a lot of freaking choice, and the realistic alternatives are worse. Basically, a small farm future is probably the least worst future available, and the sooner we wise up to that, the less worse it might be.
And now for the dumbassery. #MillionsWillStarve
For some reason, it seems to be commonly thought that an agrarian localist future where a lot of people are involved in making a livelihood from their local ecological base will involve mass starvation.
People pressing this view rarely provide any evidence to support it – the closest they come in a UK context is the observation that the country has been a net food importer for 200 years. Which is true – but it reflects political choices, not ecological limits.
Still, I get that there are genuine worries about future hunger. So here’s a plan to allay the risk. Let’s concentrate the majority of people worldwide together on tiny land areas in densely-populated cities. Let’s establish elaborate and fragile long-distance supply chains based on non-renewable and polluting fossil energy to import from afar the food, water, energy and other materials that these tightly-packed urban multitudes need to stay alive, and to remove their wastes and dump them elsewhere. Let’s incorporate every farming area into a global economy that pushes them to produce their most advantageous agricultural product to sell into global commodity markets at the cheapest possible price regardless of long-term sustainability. Let’s particularly focus global production around a few grain crops which can be readily mechanized, processed and transported, and let’s concentrate their cultivation in a handful of semi-arid continental breadbasket regions at great risk of climate-induced crop declines or failure. Let’s mine the non-renewable minerals like phosphates needed to sustain our crops from the handful of places in the world where they’re easily extracted, and then after use dump most of them with our sewage where they can’t be recovered. Let’s also try to use scarce and precious generated electricity to energise microbial food production to feed the city multitudes, using vastly complicated and largely non-renewable manufactured industrial plant assembled via the same fragile, fossil-fuel dependent global supply chains that are otherwise servicing our cities. Let’s monetize every possible aspect of society and try to maximize monetary returns to the point where inequalities within and between countries and the increasingly desperate search for economic growth foment geopolitical meltdown.
Let’s do all that, and then ridicule arguments for agrarian localism on the grounds that distributed human populations involved in nutrient-cycling local agricultures might suffer hunger.
However you look at the future, the risk of food scarcity is real. Humanity faces grave problems, to which nobody has easy answers. But the notion that existing economic and agricultural trends are obviously the best means to allay them is not as obvious as many people seem to think. And virtue signalling one’s position in this debate by imputing mass death to other positions isn’t a good look. #LikeTheKhmerRouge
Did somebody say distributed human populations with many people involved in food production? What, you mean like the Khmer Rouge?
No, not like the Khmer bloody Rouge. How is this a serious argument? Take some perfectly common historical practice like agrarian labour intensification and dismiss it with reference to the most extreme, pathological and violent context for it you can think of. A lot of people like to ride horses. Not all of them are Genghis Khan.
Let’s play out this talking point in relation to some possible future conversations:
S/he 1: “Honey, the price of fruit and veg in the shops is just getting silly. Why don’t we dig up the lawn and make a veg plot instead?”
S/he 2: “What, like the Khmer Rouge?”
S/he 1: “No”
Friend 1: “I’ve heard the council are planning to sell that derelict lot down the road to a housing developer. I think we should try to put together a neighbourhood bid for it and set up a community garden instead”
Friend 2: “What, like the Khmer Rouge?”
Friend 1: “No”
Farmer: “Honey, we just can’t afford the diesel and pesticides to keep cropping the big field the way we’ve always done. And there are a lot of people in the village now who are desperate for a bit of land to grow food on. Maybe we could figure out a way to set up allotments and smallholdings with them?”
Farmer’s husband: “What, like the Khmer Rouge?”
Farmer: “No”
Civil servant: Madam President, the economy is in ruins, people are queuing around the block for food and fuel, social tensions are boiling over, and this land-for-all movement is getting out of hand. We’ve got to ramp up the ideology that urbanism, non-farm employment and the growth of capital is the only correct way. And shoot anyone who tries to leave the city.
President: “What, like the Khmer Rouge?”
Civil servant: “Well, sort of, yes”
Seriously, enough. #BackToTheStoneAge
To suggest that more people in the future might be involved directly in furnishing their food invites the argument that this would involve ‘turning the clock back’ to some previous age – the 19th century, or the Middle Ages, or the Neolithic, or the Palaeolithic, or whatever.
Now, there is a worthwhile debate to be had about what a society with more people producing their material livelihood renewably from their local ecological base would look like, what kind of problems it would face and so on. But in addressing those problems it doesn’t help to look at them through a normative and spatial conception of historical time – the notion that we must move ‘forwards’ and not ‘back’ in order to ‘progress’ and not be ‘backward’ and so on and so on and so on and so on, and God I’m so tired of this argument (see A Small Farm Future, Chapter 2).
Every society in every historical moment faces problems and has choices. If a contemporary society chooses to address a problem by adopting approaches that look a bit more like a society of the past, so what? Why are we so culturally immature as to consider that in itself to be a problem?
George Monbiot says that we need to jettison our ‘Neolithic’ food production methods. For sure, there are problems with the present food system that need to be changed, but what work is the word ‘Neolithic’ doing here? Do we need to jettison ‘Neolithic’ transport technologies by no longer using wheels? Or ‘Palaeolithic’ industrial technologies by no longer using sharpened blades? There are newer technologies around for these things – jet engines and laser beams, for example. Invariably, they use more energy than the old ones and are unnecessary for most day-to-day needs. Maybe there’s a lesson there.
A point I make in my new book is that past societies were often pretty good at figuring out social institutions that enabled them to live within ecological and material limits locally. Hopefully, present societies will be ‘advanced’ enough to learn from them. #IndustryVoice
People sometimes dismiss vegan objections to livestock farming along the lines of ‘well, you would say that, you’re a vegan’ – to which a reasonable response is ‘No, I’m a vegan because of my objections to livestock farming’.
I’ve encountered people dismissing my defence of farming on the grounds that I would say that, because I’m a farmer (an honorific I’m not sure I fully deserve). Well, likewise, I’m a (small-scale) farmer because I became convinced that what’s needed in the future is more small-scale farming.
I think these kinds of arguments are an ad hominem time-waste in both directions, and I’m not going to engage in them.
But I’ll just add that there are a lot of different kinds of farmer, and there are different industry and corporate interests in the food sector too. It’s important to disentangle them as carefully as one can.
The Guardian and its writers seem to have adopted the line that defending pretty much any form of livestock farming involves pushing an industry narrative. However, there are agribusiness interests that are perfectly happy pushing anti-livestock narratives – for them, it’s a case of heads I win, tails you lose – and I believe that some of The Guardian’s writers have been thoroughly suckered by corporate anti-livestock narratives.
Farmer’s narratives about what they’re doing and why may be more important than industry narratives. These farmer’s narratives are many and various, but they also overlap in complex ways. George Monbiot claims to be pro-peasant, but is also dead against what he calls neo-peasant bullshit. This distinction between good peasants and bad neo-peasants cries out for some critical analysis, and I aim to say more about it in due course. Maybe that makes me a voice of the peasant industry. If so, believe me, there’s not a lot of reward in it. #BucolicIdyll
If you summarily dismiss agrarian localism as a ‘bucolic idyll’ it suggests to me that you’re very ignorant about it, and probably that you’re entertaining an idyll of your own involving abundant low carbon energy. I’m not going to debate this with you individually online, because life’s too short. But I’ll happily enter into a dialogue with you in another way – so feel free to read my books A Small Farm Future or Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, available from all bookselling outlets.
Jibes about bucolic idylls are to be expected from randomers on the internet, but not so much from eminent journalists who’ve written books about the food and farming system. So it’s disappointing to see George Monbiot playing this game. Instead of absorbing the thought of, say, Glenn Davis Stone or Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, what he gives us by way of evidence for the dangerous idealism of the case for agrarian localism is a magazine article about King Charles. Not good enough.
Almost nobody uses the phrase ‘bucolic idyll’ unironically. But there’s one exception I can think of – on page 68 of Regenesis, Monbiot writes: “I have met people who have moved to the countryside in pursuit of the bucolic idyll, only to find themselves immersed in fear and loathing” due to conflict with farming communities.
There’s a lot to unpack there, and maybe I’ll try to do it in a future post. Meanwhile, I’ll just suggest that idylls invest everybody’s thinking. Many who scorn bucolic idylls seem to be heavily invested in other idylls of the techno or urban variety. Maybe to get to a worthwhile debate, we need to identify the reasons and passions behind these different idylls, rather than just mocking them.
And talking of bucolic idylls, I hope my Twitter profile picture of me wielding my scythe sets up the necessary resonances. I wrote an essay nearly eight years ago called On the iconography of my scythe which I think stands up pretty well for my present purposes. The only really troubling thing about re-reading it is the fact that, eight years ago, I was promising to stop wasting my time debating with ecomodernists. I don’t seem to have succeeded… Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
"....small-scale mixed farming is far more productive per acre even on a calorie basis than modern machine + chemical agriculture."
- There's little doubt about this: to anyone who has even had a small allottment, a few acres intensively worked by hand will outproduce modern machine farming by far.
It's hard to believe that most farms in the UK up to the mid 19th c were actualy under 100 acres: effectively small enough to be worked by a family with a horse or two. The horse feed of course would eat into the acreage having it's own fuel needs. The advent of the tractor brought that to an end and in doing so freed up more land for food but the costs involved required more cash crops to be sold resulting in any net gain having to be offset against mechanical costs and the oil price: essentially a conversion of (once cheap) oil energy to food energy and this of course leads back to Smaje's main point: that growing food is essentially about energy conversion, and in that score Monbiots "Techno" solution doesn't cut it. Substituting say solar electricity for oil might be a step forward...though I note my neighbour-of-the-ugliest-wind-turbine-in-Scotland must have far more power than he requires but still uses diesel tractors and machinery...it all takes time I suppose...which unfortunately is in short supply.
Anywise again, lots of food for thought so ta for that. Regards
It's difficult to tell because we've managed to sell a lot of it, but I'd say the 4ish acres we've got would easily supply all our veg needs - year-round if we had storage, albeit with much more given over to potatoes because I've no idea what to do with grain crops. We've only cultivated one plot of 25X30m this year and already we've had more 2nds veg than we know what to do with! The issue is fertility, traction and then all the other needs of housing, clothing etc, if we're looking at it from a subsistence pov. And we'd need a cow of course - https://threeacresandacow.co.uk/
The frustration is knowing all that's possible to do on the land but practically impossible because capitalism demands that its needs are met first & foremost. There's a project we might be part of to grow flax on part of the field (we'd have it as a green manure crop bringing in a new plot from pasture) as part of a university project. They tout the 'commercial' possibilities, and flax was indeed a big part of the local economy here not so long ago. But nowadays, competing against international markets for cotton, not to mention nylon, polyester, elastane etc when we'd have to ret it in a pond, separate the fibres, card it, spin it, dye it, weave it? You're 'avin' a larf mate! Unless some local artisan wants to make hypoallergenic underwear for £100 a go...
Still, if the skills can be kept alive for saner times to come, maybe that has value in itself.
"There's a project we might be part of to grow flax on part of the field (we'd have it as a green manure crop bringing in a new plot from pasture) as part of a university project. They tout the 'commercial' possibilities, and flax was indeed a big part of the local economy here not so long ago. But nowadays, competing against international markets for cotton, not to mention nylon, polyester, elastane etc when we'd have to ret it in a pond, separate the fibres, card it, spin it, dye it, weave it? You're 'avin' a larf mate! Unless some local artisan wants to make hypoallergenic underwear for £100 a go..."
Lol! You forgot about bleaching it after weaving...soak in lye and milk for a week, then roll it out in the field for a number of other days in the sun to make it white...turning occasionaly. Then rinse and clean it all again....it was done here too. There are paddocks down near the village here still called the "Linen /bleach fields"...just along the road from houses called "Cash Feus" i.e. " Cheese rents". (The place incidentally where Johnny Cash gets his name from)
This kind of stuff always took a lot of organisation and people to provide for even a local market: specialists dedicated to it.
An easier green manure crop is annual rye grass...which with its long stems is also excellent for the easier craft of weaving baskets and the like: I once wove a Beehive (skep) with it...but they are illegal to use now.
Apparently the retting is done with the uprooted plants lying on the damp soil, not in a pond. And by 'we' I meant 'they' - we would only be taking on the responsibility of growing, weeding & maybe harvesting it, no mean feat in itself as crops I've seen grown for seed get swamped by weeds if you don't get them in time. I've not heard them explain how they plan to do the processing. Should be fun for the students to try & work out!
Hadn't considered rye grass as a craft material, good shout. Generally we avoid it in green manure mixes because of being impossible to terminate unless you plough it a foot under. Buckwheat has done well, and could provide a crop if I can figure out how to thresh it and maybe dehull the seeds. And field beans are looking ok so far for over winter, though they're getting nibbled by something and I'm skeptical about their frost hardiness.
'Cheese rents' - lol, bit of a different world! Would prefer no rent myself, but maybe there's something in between...