Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
236 Chris Smaje - High tech manufactured food won’t save us. Spread money, people and energy more thinly instead
A conversation with Chris Smaje, farmer and author of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, about manufactured food not being the solution to the food, agriculture, and climate crises, despite what George Monbiot portraits in Regenesis. Why don’t we just grow food from thin air and all move to cities and have nature rewild the countryside? If this sounds dystopian to you, this conversation is perfect for you. We unpack the many issues with that worldview and how it most likely creates more problems than it solves. There are huge technical challenges with this kind of manufactured food, like energy costs and health. But this is about much more; this is also about the concentration of people, capital, and power in cities and the rural-urban divide.
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Are you tired of your friends pointing to George Monbiot's Regeneresis when he portrays manufactured foods as the solution to food and agriculture and the climate crisis? Why don't we just grow food from thin air and all move to cities and have nature rewild the countryside? This sounds dystopian to you. This is a conversation that is perfect for you. We unpack many of the issues with that worldview and how it most likely creates more issues than it solves. There are huge technical challenges with these kinds of manufactured foods, like the energy costs and health, but it's about much more. It's also about the concentration of people, capital and power in cities and the rural-urban divide. Join me in this conversation where we challenge a lot of the common stories we tell ourselves like. No one wants to farm. Everyone wants to move to cities and have an office job and city life is more sustainable than the countryside, and we talk about other ways forward. If highly manufactured foods are a naive solution destined to fail, what are pathways forward In a future where cheap fossil fuels are no longer available? Smaller scale, diversified farms make way more sense. So how do we organize ourselves? What about the commons? How do we make this? So how do we organize ourselves? What about the commons? How do we make this work without getting naive and romantic ourselves? Or maybe we should get more romantic about food and agriculture?
Speaker 1:This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast investing as if the Mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return.
Speaker 1:Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume, and it's time that we, as investors big and small and consumers, start paying much more attention to the dirt, slash, soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community and so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you and if you have the means and only if you have the means consider joining us. Find out more on gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg. That is, gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg or find the link below welcome to another episode today with farmer and author of say no to a farm free future.
Speaker 1:Welcome chris hi, hi, nice to be here and, first of all, I really enjoyed the book. Everybody should go and get it. Obviously. I'll put a link below in um, in the show notes, and we're going to unpack it's. It's short, which is great. It's uh like a? Um sort of extended essay, and but let's let's unpack a bit your journey previously, of your journey leading up to this how come you spend most of your? I like to ask it in a way like how come you spend most of your awake hours, uh, thinking about and and writing, and also working in, in and around soil? What led you to, to that career path of all the other, probably easier ones, that you didn't?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, I, I, um, I mean originally I was a.
Speaker 2:I trained as a social scientist and sort of anthropology, sociology, social policy and sort of that was how I started my career, I guess, in anthropology. I was kind of interested in peasant farming and you know the whole way that farmers are sort of integrated into the wider global economy, but I didn't actually know anything about farming itself back then. It was kind of an intellectual interest. But I guess in the it was sort of the late 90s, it was the whole. You know, climate change was starting to sort of rise up the agenda and sort of energy and food futures kind of was looming large in that and I kind of felt the need to be doing something a little bit different with my career. So I kind of stepped away from academia and into small scale local farming, sort of veg growing basically. And yeah, I've sort of done that to a greater or lesser degree since then. But that kind of draws you back into the politics and the social science almost, you know, because you sort of realize you're a small pawn in a bigger economic system.
Speaker 2:So sort of some of my more recent writing has kind of emerged out of that experience.
Speaker 1:And do you remember what led you, what was drawing you to the smallholder and the peasant side to begin with? What was the pull there from a sociology side of things?
Speaker 2:Super interesting, but not the first choice.
Speaker 2:I think sort of huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of capital, sort of huge amounts of economic action that we kind of mobilise through, you know quite abstract means, and I guess you know kind of drawn to that sort of counter argument, that countercurrent.
Speaker 2:You know people like Ivan Illich or the distributists I'm sort of interested in, or sort of you know Gandhi, you know, so that you really know, you understand that you're an ecological protagonist within local systems. You understand the consequences of your action, you understand the impact that your agriculture is having on your soil, you know where the food is going and you know the whole bunch of political and economic debates we can have around that. But ultimately I kind of think of, and you know the whole bunch of political and economic debates we can have around that, but ultimately I kind of think of, you know, shortening the chains, creating a more human food system, building local cultures around food, not relying on sort of overly abstract economic and kind of technical you know sort of highly ramified technical systems to um, provide for our needs is kind of the way that we need to go ultimately and what triggered that?
Speaker 1:the, the ultimate book, basically, that came out, but also the, the focus on, let's say, the, the extreme technical side of food, or the response to George Monbiot, who wrote a book Regeneresis, I think, which is annoying that it takes a title like compared to regeneration, which has become extremely popular. I think many people just read it. I know many investors read it for sure, a number of people listening here as well, and I think the first half I didn't read it for sure, a number of people listening here as well, and I think the first half I didn't read it. I read a lot of uh reviews, um, but the first half paints a pretty accurate picture of of the issues and then it goes into, as I go, la la land of solutions, food out of thin air and and all of that, um, why did that trigger you so much and you? You ended up responding and then writing a pretty significant piece debunking a lot of the things there.
Speaker 2:Well, I felt I mean, you know George is one of the few voices of kind of radical ecological thinking in mainstream journalism here in the UK and probably wider, and I sort of felt like he'd wider and I sort of felt like he'd sort of gone a little bit off piste with that book and which is fair, you know, it's fair enough up to a point everyone you know can go on intellectual journeys of as they wish.
Speaker 2:But I sort of felt like there was some kind of discontinuities in the book. Like you say, people who don't necessarily know much about the food and farming system could read it, and that it's a kind of eco-modernist techno fix kind of pulled down from on high and doesn't really engage with the food justice movement and those kinds of ideas of making food. And you know those kinds of ideas of making food kind of connecting it culturally, locally and sort of local access to resources. I mean, I don't want to talk too much about George, I guess, because I hope that we might have a debate and we didn't really. He was quite dismissive of my response.
Speaker 1:Because you wrote it as an essay to to him and like what happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we engaged I, I engaged positively with him some years ago when I wrote a critique of um eco-modernism, the eco-modernist manifesto, and I I kind of think he's sort of drifted more into that way of thinking which is to treat the various problems we have food, climate, energy, treat them. I mean, you know I'm not saying he's not political about them, but ultimately they're sort of treated as a series of discrete technical problems that we can fix by technical means.
Speaker 1:Without taking into consideration the political systems.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ultimately, yeah, which, and I think you know part of the reason for that is because the political considerations are huge. I mean, you know we're talking about sort of fundamentally redesigning or reconfiguring the way that we live. You know, and so I can see the. You know, to steel man, the eco-modernist argument, it's kind of like look, we don't have time live. You know, and so I can see the. You know the.
Speaker 2:To steel man, the eco-modernist argument. It's kind of like look, we don't have time. You know we're living in this.
Speaker 2:You know, highly sort of energy intensive, highly urbanized um civilization. The only way that we can solve the problems is by is by going with that and and technical solutions. But you know, my view is that that's kind of that's how we've got to the mess that we're in. You know we've sort of pushed those high energy, abstracted, you know, highly capitalised, highly urbanised ways of organising ourselves as a society, as a civilisation. You know that's the mess that we've landed ourselves in and you know we're not going to get out of it by more of the same. So, yeah, so it is, I think, a sort of depoliticisation. It's a way of using tech as a sort of magic bullet and it, you know the, the, there's a lot of issues it. It kind of slides around that way of thinking and and and particularly um, you know the, the, the food justice movement globally, the food sovereignty movement and so on. So, um, also, you know, I think there are some real technical problems yeah, let's get into.
Speaker 1:Let's get into those as well. We'll get to the food, the food sovereignty side. But you make a very clear case of of. Let's say, many of the techno optimists or techno fix people have been very optimistic I don't know if it's in the word, but about the energy use and the technical feasibility of of creating massive amounts of food, and I see that in the vertical farming space as well and in other spaces. If you had to explain that to a layman, basically like why? Because somebody read that book and said this is the perfect solution. It requires very little energy, very little space and it's the same nutrient density or same quality as as when you you had. You're at the dinner party and somebody throws that argument out there. What's your normal go-to? Um, go-to, let's say, set of answers to slowly unpack that without um sounding like yeah, that never works. Or like without sounding like a luddite, basically well.
Speaker 2:Well, you know the luddites, I think you know they, they Luddites. I think you know they themselves had quite a good critique of the situation that they were faced with. You know they get a bit of a bad press. But yeah, I don't get to be, I'm still being a small-scale farmer. I don't get to too many dinner parties, but if I were to try and rehearse the arguments, I mean, basically the main technique that um monbio talks about in his book and that I critique is um a hydrogen oxidizing bacteria. So you basically um take this bacteria, put it in a steel bioreactor, feed it oxygen and hydrogen and a bunch of other elements, um, you know that leads it to reproduce. It creates a kind of slurry of dead um microbial matter that you know. You can produce um a powder like a sort of protein rich flour, um, and you can um do a bunch of things with it. I mean, there's a whole kind of set of health questions around that, the sort of you know the whole ultra-processed food narrative that's taken off a bit recently that I don't really talk about that much in my book. But you know there's that side of it.
Speaker 2:But the real problem with it from a technical point of view, I think, is well several problems with it. The one I focus on mostly is energy. So in order to produce hydrogen, you need to basically split water into its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen. That takes an awful lot of energy. That takes an awful lot of energy. I mean, at present, most of the hydrogen used in the world comes from fossil energy. Obviously, if you're advancing this as an environmentally beneficial process, you can't do that. You need to use renewable electricity as the source. So ultimately, this becomes an argument about energy futures and the extent to which renewable electricity is going to sort of ride into the rescue of our kind of present fossil-fuelled civilisation, and I know some people believe that it will. I'm not particularly convinced that it will do, but bear in mind that at the moment, we use the sun to energize almost all of our agriculture.
Speaker 2:So what's on the table with this suggestion is not only are we going to decarbonize the existing energy system and switch to renewables and low carbon forms of energy, we're also going to add the energetic requirements of the food system to this decarbonisation task. And when you? You know, when you compute the energetic requirements? I mean, you know, I calculated, I think. I think it's an underestimate for all sorts of reasons. Something like sort of 60-odd kilowatt hours of energy per kilo of protein, and here we're talking mostly about protein. If we're really talking about feeding the world, we've got to think about the energy calories as well, which is even more problematic. So it's a huge, you know, if you scale that up in terms of a mass feeding of the global population, it's a massive energy requirement that we're adding to the existing energy system which we're not doing a great job globally of decarbonizing anyway.
Speaker 1:So, um, you know, I I think, um, uh, from from a sort of energy futures and climate change point of view, it doesn't really stack up yeah, and it seems to be way a way bigger lever is seems to be how to get fossil fuels out of the current agriculture and food system, not to have more energy intensive yeah, and many people, I think, forget how intensive our food and agriculture system is in terms of fossil fuels, from making most of the inputs from an incredible amount of diesel, um, and and a lot else, not only speaking about what gets released and not stored, but just looking at how intensive, how many calories we use to produce one calorie, and I think that's the the like. The neglected lever is there, um, but it it's just sounds so good to be true, or too good to be true, like let's produce food and if it uses way less water and way less this and way less that, but a proper life cycle assessment would probably show a very different story yeah, I mean that you know potentially.
Speaker 2:You know there's a lot of chemicals, including synthetic fertilizer, that go into this process. You know one potential advantage of it is that it is contained, you know, rather than than sort of spreading fertilizer and pesticides and so on all over the fields. You know there's, there's a, you know it's sort of contained within an industrial facility but, like you say, with a wider lifecycle assessment. You know it's sort of contained within an industrial facility but, like you say, with a wider lifecycle assessment. You know, when you look at the costs of the energy and you know sort of concentrating all that in the facility, you know it does have, you know it does have kind of wider knock on effects. But you know, in a sense I think it's driven by.
Speaker 2:The other side of this is the whole debate about biodiversity. You know it's driven by the idea that agriculture sort of has an intrinsically negative impact on nature. So the idea is to try and sort of remove food production from nature. You know, then we get into a whole debate about, well, sort of energy production you know PV farms and so on.
Speaker 2:you know that's sort of how does that all figure in, but it's you know you hear this phrase sort of clean meat or whatever, and it's that sort of sense of cleanliness that we can sort of extract ourselves from nature. And the assumption that all forms of agriculture you know that regen ag is, you know is maybe it's a bit of a gimmick, you know it doesn't really, it's not really possible for us to be positive ecological protagonists.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's the biggest underlying narrative issue or challenge, like not believing and maybe it's true, but not believing human beings can be a positive keystone species. Yeah, I mean, we don't have a really good track record recently and not so recently, but it's an interesting underlying. Okay, let's remove ourselves, let's all move to the city as well. We'll get to the urban, rural and let's not touch it, and then forgetting that we're part of it and we'll get sick if we're not part of it. Um, but like, let's not touch, let's fence and rewound and let's, because we just have a terrible track record until now in managing landscapes yeah, well, that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean you know that. You know there is an assumption built into that that we can somehow remove ourselves and that somehow, if we're rich urban consumers, that we then won't have a negative impact on nature. And, like you say, you know we don't have a great track record. I mean, certainly, you know there's endless critiques of the track record of agriculture that we can make, also just sort of hunting and resource use generally. But I think it's good to look back to examples where people, by necessity, have had to marshal and husband resources, which sort of takes us back into that local loop. But yeah, my question to it really is you know what are the grounds for thinking that we can actually abstract ourselves from nature, that urban consumers, you know, will have this lower footprint? You know that's not very clear. And also, you know, to the extent that this is partly about meat substitutes. You know there are already good existing meat substitutes in. You know, basically, you know there are already good existing meat substitutes in you know basically, legume, you know soy and so on, which has a lower energy footprint for sure than you know, than the cellular agriculture. You know it's sort of like reinventing the wheel and there's no guarantee really. And there's no guarantee really.
Speaker 2:You know, the idea is that, well, if global consumers eat meat at the level that, say, we do in Europe or North America, well, you know, that's going to destroy the world, and that could be true. Grazing is sort of complicated, but there's no doubt that the existing sort of mass global meat industry, you know, has huge negatives associated with it. But there's kind of an assumption that people will happily switch to. You know these meat alternatives and there's, you know, I think there's a that's again is where the sociology goes missing. You know meat, think there's a that's again is where the sociology goes missing. You know, meat. What's to stop meat from them becoming this very highly sought after prestige? Good, you know that's kind of what's happened driving the price of meat down, making it more available through negative practices, you know. So the idea that people will just happily switch to a, this alternative product, um, you know, is problematic and and the product itself is problematic in different ways, you know. So, yeah, you know, I think there are some real question marks about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it was Henry Dibbleby. To the, I think, magic wand question that we always ask, at the end he said make everybody loves lentils. That would make a huge impact. Not everybody, because that would create other lentil issues, but way more people than now. And there is an argument there. We have really I mean, you go to the Asian cuisine, you have amazing meat substitutes. Try to test it. Nobody dies of it. It's pretty okay, it's pretty good for you. Okay, depending on the source, et cetera, et cetera. But there's no, it seems to be. There's, yeah, looking for a tool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a real question there about why, you know, if we're talking about meat substitutes, why are we not talking about the, you know, the legume substitutes? I mean part of the answer to that is potentially be that. You know it's still agriculture based, although do bear in mind that some of these cellular techniques you know they use um genetically modified fungus say that that uses um farmed products as a substrate.
Speaker 2:You know, like sugar, beet pulp or whatever, I mean the, the hydrogen oxidizing route. Um doesn't do that. You know some of them do use agricultural products but yeah, you know, there's a real question mark as to why. You know the existing meat substitutes that have a pretty low energy footprint and you know can be done in quite benign ways, you know, why are we not focusing on those?
Speaker 1:And you make a fascinating point on many, actually, but on rural versus urban and our narrative that urban, by definition, is more sustainable, like if we all move and we're close to each other, like it sort of makes sense in your head as well, but somehow it doesn't seem to be true. Like if we all move in high-rise buildings together, et cetera, we share resources, you need less building, et cetera, et cetera. And you make a point like actually that's true in certain circumstances, but not in many. What's the biggest counter narrative there? That we, first of all, we always continue to go to cities. I mean, this has been the last decades and a few hundred years, but nothing says that that continues as well. And there's also this like oh, we live in cities, so we're more sustainable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I guess this whole debate is a bit it gets a bit caught up on the difference between cost and efficiency, I think. So you know you get the argument about. You know it's the same. You know, with the all meat narrative, that you can produce more all meat per hectare, say, than you can a farm product, so it's more efficient. But and that can be true I mean we can unpack the details of that might be true, but it's actually we need to be looking at costs, not just efficiency. And it's the same with urbanism.
Speaker 2:You can lead a high energy, modern life more efficiently in an urban setting than a rural setting, like if everyone in the countryside needs to have a car or needs to heat a detached house, et cetera, et cetera. You know you can do that, provide those services to people more efficiently within a city. The overall cost you know if you have a lower cost, lower throughput, you know lower input kind of life, you can potentially do that much more easily in the countryside than in the city in terms of systems of food provision, for example, in terms of energy, water, disposal of wastes. I mean people like William Rees have called cities entropic black holes that they sort of suck in huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of water, huge amounts of food and sort of put out huge amounts of wastes. So you can say that that throughput is more efficient but it's high cost and it's very dependent on having abundant cheap energy. So you know a lot of this does come back to energy futures. You know, if you think that we will continue to have abundant cheap energy, but hopefully renewable rather than fossil energy, you know, then ruralization doesn't make sense. You know all of the kind of existing settlement patterns and geographies will persist. But if you don't make that assumption, then you know we're skating on very thin ice. You know, in terms of being able to maintain those systems, and that's my real fear, that we're just sort of, you know, kind of going down this wrong route that's going to lead to great suffering and misery if it all goes wrong.
Speaker 2:And you know, to some extent urbanisation has been you know it's been a long time coming but really the sort of breakneck urbanization of recent years you know has been divorcing people from the possibilities of um, of producing for needs locally, that you know those kinds of closed loop, local cycles, sort of things we were talking about earlier and sort of bringing people into um sort of much faster, wider circuits of of energy and capital exchange and um, you know that can be great. I mean, often people don't really have much choice. You know people go to where they can secure peace and prosperity. Generally in the world In recent years that has meant cities, although you know it's complicated. A lot of people, you know poor people globally, have sort of complex livelihoods, that kind of interact between the rural and the urban.
Speaker 2:So you know, to some extent I want to question this narrative of. You know nobody wants to farm, everybody wants to move to the city. You know that to the extent that it's true, that's been driven by people not necessarily having choices. You know that. You know whole histories of sort of enclosure and expropriation. But to the extent that it's true it's because it's been easier for people to find prosperity in cities, I don't think we can necessarily or in you know, mass urbanism. You know the kind of big mega cities that we see in the world today. I don't think we should necessarily assume that that's going to be the case long term, and so you know that puts us into difficult territory. But I think we need to. You know something that we need to be talking about and not assuming that you know the way that the world has been organised in the last few decades, with very high energy, fossil fuel based systems, is going to be the way of humanity long term in the future.
Speaker 1:And which I think is a very I mean it's interesting to challenge these narratives on urbanization will just continue and why it's happening. Relatively recent, I think, since the railways were invented and long distance transport and cooling, suddenly food could come from way further and cities could grow and weren't just dependent on their immediate surroundings. And from that moment, on 1890 or something, it started to explode, especially the last few decades. But it doesn't mean it continues like that because it's built, as you said, purely on cheap fossil fuels. That area has ended or is ending. And of course everybody, or many narratives like let's just replace it with the next cheap energy source. And solar is definitely getting cheaper, but by no means it's going to replace soon. Plus, it still has to replace all the fossil parts before it can actually add and just continue to absorb.
Speaker 1:So what are the narratives you're seeing on the other side, in the sense of you deliberately chose to, to move to the countryside, to to engage in food production? Has that changed since you move? Like, is there a wave under the radar or, not necessarily on the radar, people that are, let's say, thinking similar in that sense? Is that the back to the land movement as we've seen a few decades ago, um is especially in the oil crisis then. Is that happening now as well? You hear many people longing for that connection with soil or with nature, and what do you see from your perspective?
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, it is happening. I mean, just to go back to the way you set that question up, I think one aspect, you know, as you said, there's been this long-term history of urbanization which has been fossil fuel based. In recent years it's also been connected with kind of globalization, with increasing manufacturing and industry in places like China and India, based on levels of exploitation of rural labour and of countries that are peripheral to sort of zones of industrial output. But you know, I don't think that's, you know it's not sustainable, partly on an energy basis, but also on a social basis in terms of, you know, continuing to seek high levels of economic growth and profit. So there is a counter movement, you know, I don't. It's very under the radar, it's very nascent. You know it can be a bit of a sort of middle class movement of, you know, people wanting to go back to the country, and so it becomes very easy to to sort of ridicule it and say, oh, you know it's just sort of romantic, backward looking or it's, you know it's, it's kind of wealthy people who aren't sort of engaging with, with the reality, and you know that's part of the problem that we were in. There isn't really, you know a politics that's really articulating this. That's really getting noticed and that's why I'm very fearful that it's suddenly going to hit us in the face and we're not going to be prepared for it happening.
Speaker 2:There's people like Jan van der Plurg who've written about this in terms of re peasantization. There's a lot of farmers I know who you know we've got to this level of kind of squeezing of profit margins on farmers where they're almost giving up food production and thinking more in terms of kind of reconnecting locally. You know there are sort of back to the land movements increasingly in countries like India that I'm hearing about and sort of. You know a whole bunch of interesting agricultural things going on in India, things going on in India, and there is, as you say, this kind of widespread sense of people wanting access to a bit of land. I mean, I encounter that all the time. You know, you hear this kind of.
Speaker 2:There's this kind of mainstream media narrative that nobody wants to farm anymore and it's not true. You know, people don't want to be sort of screwed by the big food system and be trying to churn out food and be up to their eyeballs in debt. But people do want to farm, people do want to be producing food, growing crops and so on, and it tends to be the more diverse. You know the things that are good for us, the fruit and the vegetables. You know mixed farming, all of the things that the kind of big food system squeezes out, so, and you know there's movements like La Via Campesina, the food sovereignty movement.
Speaker 2:You know there's a lot of activism around local food in countries throughout the world. You know, in relation to local political circumstances, but it's not, you know, it hasn't kind of risen up the radar and sort of turned into a larger politics. You know, I mean we've just had an election here in the UK recently in which food and farming, just you know, didn't figure at all. And you know a rich country like the UK, we kind of assume that we can, you know we can basically buy what we want on global markets. You know I think these are going to be dangerous assumptions in the future. And you know we really need to build, you know, collectively, at a global level as much as possible, but actually drilling down into local possibilities for having local food systems that are producing good, healthy food, that are producing livelihoods for people and bringing a labor force back into farming and building resilience and local food security, and do you see any regions Because I'm still surprised, surprised I haven't seen it like.
Speaker 1:But actually some regions, yes, um, but mostly in india and other places like the global, global south even though that's a horrible term um, that are taking the lead in that and seeing that as a food sovereignty, as a security piece as well, but also as a place to, or as a way to re, almost repopulate the countryside or getting like drawing people back, which you desperately need if you want to keep your school running, your supermarket, your post office, etc. Which in many places have closed. Many places in the countryside have depopulated heavily around the world and and became also very monoculture, not only in land, but also people that left, that stayed there, maybe just the younger ones and the older ones, but everybody in the middle, sort of sort of left. And I've still, I'm still amazed that that more rural regions in europe etc. Are not actively seeking those that want to come back and are able to farm, because that's not necessarily the same people and the reality of, as you know, is very different than what you read in books et cetera. Not saying that it's not possible, not saying that it's not amazing, but it's definitely. You don't have time for dinner parties, like you mentioned.
Speaker 1:But I'm starting, like, who's going to draw people? Like, okay, we have the best soil education. If you need support, we're there. If you have the market infrastructure like this could be a draw. Like you're not going to industrialize these regions and you shouldn't. We've tried it in the past. Horrible result. But how do you draw this need that is there? Like London is full of people that want to go somewhere else. Many other big cities are, like how do you make a nice landing path for them? Like, how do you create pathways?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it's difficult because you know, for all the reasons that we've been talking about you tend to get concentration of capital that draws people into particular sort of overdeveloped regions.
Speaker 2:You know, like here in the UK most people live in the southeast which is, you know, hugely developed, developed, huge infrastructures, water stress and so on.
Speaker 2:And then you know, agriculture tends to get forced into serving global markets so that the sort of monocultures um, I mean, there's a wonderful book that's just been written, as a guy called car win graves, who I'm doing a session with um on saturday, actually he's written a book called Tear, the story of the Welsh landscape. So his argument is how in Wales there has been, you know, against all the odds, almost Wales has retained a kind of localised, quite nature friendly, potentially quite diverse agriculture, and that's partly to do with sort of language and culture, partly to do with being a little bit sort of marginal to the mainstream and to having a sort of culture that's oriented to sort of defending its ways. It's a really interesting book, but it does then raise the question, comes back to your question well, how do we generalise from that? And you know we are sort of lacking a narrative there. I mean, I think, local government or regional governments.
Speaker 2:you know, if they're forward thinking, if they're sort of switched on to this, they can do a lot of things.
Speaker 2:And again, the Welsh government has done good stuff the Future Generations Act, the One Planet Development, a lot of stuff around land use planning and sort of local economic development.
Speaker 2:I think governments can do good things but I think ultimately it's going to be trying to mobilize that kind of bottom up, grassroots kind of energy. And that I think is coming from people who you know we've had this sort of post war narrative in the global north. That you know if you can get a well-paid, salaried job and progress and you know you'll be better off than your parents and your children will be better off than you, and you know you get a career and a nice pension and all of that stuff is kind of disappearing before our eyes. You know I don't think my children are not going to be as wealthy as my own generation and jobs are no longer secure and that you know I think there does become a political potential turning point there. And you know I've seen that in the 20 odd years I've been involved in this sector so many more young people you know, thoughtful, well-educated, environmentally concerned. You know, back in the day nobody wanted to. You know, farming was so remote from from from. People's experience was now so many more young people.
Speaker 1:Have you seen that shift like the, the, the in the last 20 years?
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, and. And the problem is access to land. In a way, it's, it's, it's the um kind of, uh, the embodiment of capital in land, that that makes it difficult for people to get secure tenure. So that's the key thing where either public pressure from below or governmental action to, you know, just to keep land circulating, to, you know, for people to have secure, long-term tenure, because that's kind of what you need, you know, to develop interesting types of local food production. You know it's not just like renting a field for a couple of years and growing as much, you know, maize, silage or whatever as you can. You know it's actually, you know, having the time and the security to develop, you know, good, good, good small food systems.
Speaker 2:So I think there will come a politics around this. You know my fear is that we're leaving it sort of too late. You know that we really need to be pushing at that now because it's going to be. You know food and localism are going to be and you know the need to spread, to distribute access to land. You know access to capital and so on. You know it needs to be spread more thinly, you know, and that can happen in better or worse ways and it can happen in you know greater or lesser degrees of crisis, but the more that we can start that process now, the less painful it will be, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah's double click on that. Spread more or less concentrated, which is a big piece of the book. Why is that so important and why is it impact-wise also better to spread in terms of being super concentrated in a city I mean, we can all imagine London or other places. Why is it better to spread? For many different reasons, not only for health reasons, but to spread out, let's say. Let's say spreading, hopefully without force, is going to be a big theme over the next decades. Why is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I mean partly it's labour input into agriculture. I mean, it's a strange sector in which you know more or less every other economic sector. If you talk about creating jobs, it's like great, more jobs, you know, whereas agriculture the whole narrative has been.
Speaker 2:You know, let's get people out of agriculture Because nobody wants to do it. Real morass of bad economics around this in terms of food prices, labor prices, energy prices, sort of land and housing prices. And I mean essentially what's happened in the UK, as in many other countries I think, is that people, you know food prices historically have reduced but that's partly because we've produced, you know, bad global food commodities using, as you were saying earlier, you know, heavy inputs of fossil fuels and agrochemicals and so on, whereas you know capital has concentrated in fewer hands. You know that finds its way into land values or into housing values or into housing. So people are paying, you know, more and more money to get a roof over their heads, sort of less and less money for food. And you know that creates sort of bad cycles of food production, bad economic cycles of concentration of wealth. You know a lot of the negatives of agriculture are connected with agrochemicals, which are essentially labour substitutes. You know so lots of fertiliser, lots of pesticides. You know doing things on a bigger scale. You know making fields bigger, getting rid of hedges, getting rid of, you know of greater sort of mosaic, local landscape diversity.
Speaker 2:So the idea of spreading really is is kind of reversing all of that you know spreading the money, spreading the availability of capital, making making capital essentially, you know it's kind of embodied. It's sort of embodied labor, embodied community, making it possible for people to access that and generate more wellbeing. Not money. Money is only ever a kind of proxy for wellbeing and increasingly not a very good one. So creating sort of genuine local livelihoods, more people producing food, spending less money on land and housing and sort of more money on community benefit and all of that I mean I forget who it was. There was someone who had that quote about money being like manure. You know if it does good if it's thinly spread, but if you concentrate it it stinks basically and doesn't do any good. You know.
Speaker 2:So that idea of spreading, for you know, for a whole bunch of different reasons, sort of energy futures, water futures, but also, you know, getting people back into producing food, back into farming. You know local, you know local community well-being, you know making money serve people's needs. You know those kinds of circular economies and sort of livelihood creation. I mean that's the argument. But you know, ultimately I think the problem is we've got this concentration of capital and energy that's led to this sort of great global acceleration of capital and economic service and urbanism you know that we were talking about earlier and you know that really gets in the way of it. So you know, unlocking people's ability to access land and start producing food for, for local communities is really key.
Speaker 1:You know, let's, we'll double click, we'll go deeper into the, the land piece. Um, but I wanted to to ask you about going about getting people back into agriculture. Do you think the word back in that sense is hurting this as well, to be easily put into the naive back to the land, breaking your back again on, to put it in the corner of the anti-technology or something. I think it's easy to dismiss it. That's not true. But what do you say when people like George or others like, okay, that's just a naive, romantic idea of farming. We shouldn't indice people to go back. Actually, it's going forward, but the sort of narrative of this is just naive. Um, yeah to, will never, will never feed, etc. What do you say when people throw that at you, if they ever do?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, they throw at me all the time. Yeah, and that's one of the problem. You know, we, we, we have this um kind of instinctive resistance to anything that smacks of rural romanticism, whereas we romanticize cities endlessly. You know we've got this sort of narrative about how wonderful city life, you know progressive, all the rest of it. But as soon as you know you start getting poetic about the. You know the beauties of the rural landscape and you know it's important to be aware of that, the danger of romanticism. But you know that's um, uh, but also bear in mind that I mean, I talk about it a little bit in my book.
Speaker 2:You know the romantic movement, um originated as a critique of industrialism and what it saw as the dreadful negatives of industrialism. And, and, and you know we need to, we need to not forget that Um, you know my, my, um, my great grandfather was, uh, you know we need to not forget that. You know my great-grandfather was, you know, came from a coal mining family and was killed in a pit explosion in the late 19th century. So you know that sort of industrial impetus to create, you know, a world of manufacturing and urbanism came at a heavy, heavy human cost. So you know, I think the key thing is not to fixate on the past and say we need to go back to some particular image of the past. I do think it's worth thinking in terms of, you know, letting go of these spatial metaphors of progress, going forwards, going upwards, you know, and actually, well, that's led us into a whole bunch of problems, you know. So it might be worth, um, uh, taking a step back from that.
Speaker 1:And you know, really, the questioning what is a good life? The?
Speaker 2:sort of backward looking aspect of this is learning. You know, people in the past had to create livelihoods with local and low energy means. So more or less every part of the world has got a traditional agriculture that fed people use with low energy input and locally, and we can learn from those people. That's all I'm really saying. I'm not saying we should be trying to replicate everything exactly as they did, but you know. But let's, you know, let's get over ourselves a bit, let's get over our arrogance that we've solved all these problems. And just look you know you hear this quite a lot now with approaches to sort of indigeneity or, you know, sort of decolonising agriculture.
Speaker 2:You know that there are all sorts of people historically throughout the world who have figured out good, ecologically sustainable agricultural systems. So you know, let's just look at them and learn from them. But you know, let's also not be romantic about the progress of our own society and sort of think about other ways of doing it, to be aware of the unromantic side of industrialism in terms of bad labour practices, exploitation and so on. And then sort of try, and you know, try and make the most of that, try and create, you know, not some kind of backward looking old style agricultural systems, but you know one that's that that that's sort of equal to the present age. Um, and yeah, that that's what it's about ultimately. You know, it's not about trying to recreate any particular image of the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm reading C-Topia of Caroline Steele and I'm a bit late to the party. Um, but there was a fascinating, many fascinating pieces, highly recommended um, on the early stages of the industrial revolution or the industrial transition, and that it was extremely difficult to get people to work in the factories because they had way better um quality of life in their rural setting, and so they tried to. It's actually really sad, I'm laughing. But um, they tried to pay more, um, and but people started working less because they needed less of the, they needed less days to to earn enough to be fine. And so they tried, I think, another round and just didn't really make sense because people kept working less and less, which is sort of what we, I think, predicted in.
Speaker 1:Uh, what was uh kane's predicting? Like we had so much free time that we don't know what to do with it. That didn't really happen. We're working more and more ever, and so they ended up. The solution ended up being paying just enough for a full work week of six, seven days that you could barely live and that would force people into working all the hours because you needed people to run the factories. I haven't checked the source of that, but if true, it's a pretty grim. Let's move to the city and work amazing jobs. Of course, we can easily say that now as working from a laptop and doing consultancy work, but it is the very unromantic side of the industrial transition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's important to, yeah, absolutely it's important not just to fall. You know, there is a romanticism of industrialization which makes, which falls into that trap of, oh, everybody you know, happily down tools in the field and left and you actually have to look at the history of is.
Speaker 2:You know, one aspect of this is, I think what people really don't like is the is is being under somebody else's thumb and that can be a problem for rural people.
Speaker 2:You know, if, uh, you know the, the sort of old, sort of stereotypical idea of the, the feudal overlord, you know that if you, if you can't escape somebody's power and move on and be an autonomous agent, you know that is a big problem and I think there's a little bit of a sort of historical residue of that in people thinking about ruralism.
Speaker 2:You know every country has it or every region has its own histories around this. But part of what people are kicking out against is this notion of kind of not having agency, not having autonomy, you know, having to do somebody else's bidding bit of rural land, because you know there's the other side to that coin. Now is that people feel very pressured by wage labour, by working in the city, by insecurity of jobs and the idea, you know, of having a bit of land that's your own that you can produce food on, you know increasingly is not seen as a kind of, you know, being a serf to somebody else's rural power. It's actually seen as a bit of agency and autonomy and, you know, stopping those concentrations of power and wealth and ability to control people really.
Speaker 1:And do you think that I see some voices now quite heavily pushing against, let's say, the first generation, single family, small farm, for reasons economics, very difficult to make work, but also agro-logically, agronomically difficult, call them.
Speaker 1:People are like there needs to be bigger units, not necessarily owned by uh, could be in the commons, could be like how do you scale not scale this in the way, but how do you make sure that you have some economies of scale, that the land might be holding the commons but you have four or five, six farms or ten farms operating partly on each other's land and and just makes so much more sense in terms of processing, in terms of sales, in terms of not this single family farm that moved back to the countryside with the children does everything themselves, from marketing to growing to sales, to burnout and all of that. Yeah, I think we should also not romanticize that too much. Do you see that as well in your circles? It's, I hear more in the us, but I see it does resonate. I think how do we escape also that trap of everything ourselves on our little piece of paradise?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, I mean, that's a really interesting one, and it's hard to come up with a kind of general answer to that. I agree with you. I mean, I think, the sorry.
Speaker 1:Context is everything it is.
Speaker 2:It is, and I think, the advantage of making farming part of a domestic unit. I mean it's interesting that even sort of big scale, highly capitalised farming tends still I mean not always, but it still very often is family run in a way that a lot of other things aren't. But also small firms, you know, small local enterprises, you know, are often family run. So I think there's a whole interesting bunch of questions around the family that I mean. I certainly want to sort of get into thinking and writing about that aspect more. But I think so I agree, I think this is a time to be experimenting with ways of working collectively in different ways. But I think you know I've written a little bit critically about the commons and forms of collectivism, because I think we can romanticise that as well that you know you have to put a lot of effort into um, into developing the relationships and and building structures around that, which is a kind of a cost in itself, um, and the other side of it is making the domestic unit a unit of production. You know I've been talking about the need to limit productivity. So, and this is a really interesting one because I agree with you, we do need economies of scale. We do need local markets, we do need sort of food to be available for people to buy and so on, but we don't need to sort of drive, you know, have this huge kind of low price driver, that kind of, you know, pushes net present value above all other things. And that's where having partly having local food cultures where people really value the device, the diversity, you know, the local types of food, orchards, um, uh and so on and so on, type types of livestock raising and so on, that's important. But it is also, I think, important for people for for the ability to produce food to be more widespread, so that you know, maybe breaking down the distinction between, um, you know, the professional grower and the amateur, um, and so having having a domestic unit that's actually involved in food production, I think it's important to retain that. But also you're right not to not not to sort of overdo it.
Speaker 2:And and you know, it's interesting that a lot of agricultures historically have been very clever at actually dividing up the aspects of the local landscape or local production that is organised in common and the ones that are done by a family or a household.
Speaker 2:I mean, here in southwest England with a history of dairying. It's fascinating things like dairy cows which would be owned and milked by the household individually and haymaking would be done individually, whereas grazing would often be in common and cheese making would be in common. So you know you made that point about economies of scale in the sort of you know the local processing infrastructure, so people, you know, if people are given the opportunity, they can be really good at developing complex local systems. That mix kind of you romanticize the family and the household, but also not to romanticize the commons and to be aware that you know working with a big load of other people sort of imposes um costs of its own, you know like everybody, I think, who's involved in any kind of cooperative or intentional community or a group of people trying to do things well, would agree.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, and I'd like to ask this question. Um, let's say we're in in the theater in london, in the city, and, and we've done an evening, and it's mostly people working in finance, either managing their own money or other people's money, and, and, of course, we challenge a lot of their thinking. We got them excited, but if there's one thing you want them to remember, and when they walk out and, more importantly, when they get back to their desk the next day, what is the one seat you would like to plant in, let's say, a whole theater full of financial-minded and financial people?
Speaker 2:In terms of what they might do with the money to Potentially but also in general, like what's the thing you want them to remember?
Speaker 1:because we know people forget like you're excited about an evening or excited about a book and then when push comes to shovel and you actually need to do something, it's easier to keep doing the same thing well.
Speaker 2:I suppose I would like them to remember this thing we've talked about about spreading, you know, spreading capital and spreading people and generating local livelihoods, kind of local economic energy, as it were, and the way that I think people like that could help. I mean, I think we're in this very overcapitalized phase of global history, but I think a lot of people do care about their communities and do care about local food, and what I would like to see is younger generations of food producers with lots of interesting ideas about how they can produce food for their communities, having that opportunity and trying to unlock the capital that's very often sort of locked up in land prices or in housing prices. You know, people sort of passing that on to the next generation, but passing it on in terms of access to local land. You know, maybe we're talking about small towns where you know people want to do all sorts of things with the land around a small town, but what we should be doing is producing food for the town.
Speaker 2:So if people could use accrued capital, either on a sort of individual personal level you know people who've sort of done well in their careers and have a nice house can release a bit of capital to access some land or you know people who are more part of the financial world, maybe to sort of create some matched funding for that kind of thing. And again, you know, we get into all these issues of human relationships and people sort of figuring out vehicles that work. But that you know, I think there is impetus, or potentially there's impetus there for people to create small local access to land and, you know, creating these kind of local food loops. So you know, that's what I'd like to see, you know, make that capital work locally in terms of access to land for good food production purposes access to land for good food production purposes, spread the money.
Speaker 1:And what would you do if you would be in their shoes and, for example, have a billion dollar or billion pounds, sorry to put to work for any length of time, for any return profile, et cetera but you suddenly find yourself I don't know if there's a lottery that size, but let's say, and there's a condition that it has to be put to work. I'm not looking for exact amounts, but I'm looking. What would you focus on? Is it mostly on the land side? Is it mostly like what would be big buckets of your attention if you had those kinds of resources?
Speaker 2:I think it would. From my point of view it would be mostly on the land side. I would do pretty much what I just said and try and create. You know I would sort of use that money. You know there's groups like the Ecological Land Co-op here in Britain and you know there's other groups, similar groups, in France that I'm aware of, I'm sure many other countries, which are trying to access land.
Speaker 2:But you know it's hard when you're pitted against big corporate players or you know big scale farming. You're pitted against big corporate players or you know big scale farming, so I would use money like that, basically say, well, ultimately, you know we are, we're animals, you know we're organisms, we need to eat every day. You can't eat money and you know searching for sort of high returns on profit is maybe not going to be of great long-term service to oneself or to humanity, whereas using that money to create good structures, or you know, either to access land directly and sort of create that kind of those beneficial local circuits of exchange, or to use the money to sort of make the infrastructure around that flow a bit more easily. You know to do some experiments, trials, sort of demonstration projects, or you know building financial vehicles. I mean certainly using the acumen that people in the financial world you know building financial vehicles. I mean certainly using the acumen that people in the financial world you know, who understand money, you know applying that to local food production, but not with a view to maximising return, but with a view to maximising local social benefit, you know could be hugely beneficial and that, I think, is ultimately what we're going to have to do.
Speaker 2:And you know, the sooner that we, all of us, using our different skills, kind of, you know, jump on that train, the better really, you know. So, yeah, but I think access to land is key because, you know capital tends to accumulate in it and if we don't have, you know we've stripped out a lot of that local food infrastructure. I mean that would be another thing, that those kind of processing facilities and local food infrastructures. You know the easiest thing to do is to invest money in land and to farm it almost as an afterthought with, know whatever is the cheapest, quickest, you know, best return for your buck, um, but we actually need to be building a more diverse, local and ecological food system. So, you know, finding ways to make money work uh, in in.
Speaker 1:That, I think is really what we need to be doing and as a final question, which usually leads to other final questions, but um, if you had a magic wand, you could change one thing overnight. What would that be?
Speaker 2:if I could change one thing overnight anything.
Speaker 1:Global consciousness, land ownership taxes anything. Taxes anything.
Speaker 2:I think. I suppose it would be that maybe it would be what we were talking about earlier, that cultural consciousness about food and accessing land. I think it's there, it's kind of there in people, this desire to be part of local food communities, but there are so many ways in which you know we're diverted from it. Oh, it's not realistic, you can't make money. It's romantic, all of those things we were talking about. So I think if I could wave a wand, it would just be to, you know, sprinkle a bit of that stardust into people's minds that you know we've allowed to. You know we've got wowed by big high tech urbanism, you know, sort of arrow of progress into the future. If we could really just connect with that other narrative in ourselves about food, about being an organism, about being local, about being part of communities, I think a lot of those other things could then start falling into place. So, yeah, it would probably be that magic wand with a bit of localism stardust to it.
Speaker 1:Actually, it's a perfect end to this conversation. So I want to thank you so much for coming on here, for the work you do, obviously for Growing Food and for writing the book and, of course, questioning a lot of the narratives that we not necessarily maybe on this podcast but hear a lot like the push to the city, everything is efficient there, sustainable progress, and just questioning that and putting some real numbers under that as well, like let's look at the energy potential, energy costs of this revolution, of this revolution versus that, etc. And so thank you so much for coming on here in for sure, a busy summer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks. Well, thanks very much for having me. It was an enjoyable conversation. So, yeah, thanks very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time.
