Paul Fernhout: for a right meshwork between organic and industrial agriculture

Despite the fact that evidence demonstrating organic agriculture’s productive potential has been steadily accumulating, there are still many voices holding out to industrial agriculture’s absolute superiority. For example, in these commentaries about Postapocalyptic Gardens on the IEET website (also here)

Bruno Rinesi writes that:

Home gardening as a significant food source for consumption and barter has been a regular fixture in many civilizations, and its resurgence, specially in the United States, seems to be tied to both the economic recession and the rising price of food. As the first trend has lowered wages, the application of personal time to growing food has come to appear a reasonable investment. However, there’s a significant difference between growing food as a substitute for less productive recreational activities, and growing food as a substitute for time employed at work. In the latter case, it seems unlikely that an amateur, small-scale operation can produce food more cheaply, when all costs, specially time, have been properly accounted for, than a large-scale industrial operation.

He concludes that:

We enthusiastically support green cities, but not a retreat to an economy confined to the local scale. A complex, distributed, specialized economy is, despite its larger requirements for coordination and management, immensely more effective than any collection of isolated or semi-isolated households and small communities could be, and whatever challenges we will have to face in the coming decades, we stand a better chance with more resources at our disposal, not less.

I’ve asked Paul Fernhout, who is a very active member of the Open Manufacturing email list, to respond to this challenge against relocalized agriculture.

Paul Fernhout:

“In the 1980s, I volunteered on an organic farm, been a cashier at an organic foods store, and was program administrator for NOFA-NJ’s organic farm certification program for a season. NOFA is Northeast Organic Farmer’s Association. My wife and I also wrote a simulation about gardening to help people learn more about how to grow their own food locally in a sustainable way. So, I’ve thought some about this issue. I’ve also long been an enthusiast for local efforts.

But, the fact is, the argument above, that trade is more efficient than doing everything yourself, is correct (up to a point).

The limitations of trade is that it encourages people to do big endeavors that pass on external costs to others (like pollution from pesticide runoff into groundwater, the cruelty suffered by animals in big factory farms, air pollution costs of cross-country trucking of lettuce, and so on — all unaccounted for in the cheaper price). Organic originally was intended to mean supporting local production; many early supporters are upset it can apply to stuff trucked from one end of the country to the other when the product can be grow locally.

Another external cost of society is the centralization of wealth in the hands of a few large farm owners (including making it difficult for new farmers to get started because land is so expensive).

Another problem is the systematic risk introduced into the food supply by a few monocultures dominating most production that may be susceptible to a common disease or cause some common human health problem (like if bioengineered with new genes in them from shellfish or whatever). Another problem with conventional agriculture is it mines the soil and allows erosion, and unlike China, in the USA, human waste is not returned to the fields to replenish the soil (although rock dust could substitute perhaps). Mainstream agriculture also puts on too much nitrogen fertilizer which displaces micronutrients leading to weaker plants that are less healthy to eat.

These factors all create big risks to our society.

Most people accept that growing some grains like wheat in the Midwest is so much easier than elsewhere that it makes a lot of sense to do that. But vegetables and livestock are a very different story. They can be grown most anywhere. So, in that sense, agriculture is way too over-centralized in the USA.

Organic agriculture tends to be more labor and knowledge intensive, so it costs more right now (until agricultural robots get better). But in any case, we are talking about 2% of the labor pool versus (guessing) 4% if we went all organic, so that is not much of an issue, considering how many people want to farm but can’t right now. In the long term, agricultural robots that already exist from cow milkers to grape vine pruners (see below links) will change how agriculture is done in the USA (and then globally), removing a lot of the tedium of it and improving the quality of the results. But, robotics assumes a significant industrial base (at least, right now; 3D printing may change that some).

I never tire of referencing Manuel de Landa’s comments about the need for situation specific balances of top-down hierarchy and bottom-up meshworks in coming up with working systems. It seems like here is another example. Agriculture in the USA has tilted too far to the big farm hierarchy side, pushing external costs like cancer and diabetes on to the public, and centralizing control and profits in a few hands, and that should be fixed. How best to fix it, including by increasing peer production is an interesting issue with lots of possibilities, some local like peer production, and some global, like a basic income. So, it is not either-or. We can, and will, have both network aspects and local aspects in a healthy food system.

Networks have their good points and their bad points. Our challenge, as a society, is to get the most out of social networks while minimizing problems they can cause. It’s not easy. But for agriculture, where bad weather is often a local phenomenon, networked agriculture may be important to prevent local famines.

Also, there are a lot of reasons people like to garden that have nothing to do with economics. It’s exercise. It’s fun. It’s spiritual. It’s educational. It helps others. It’s beautiful. And so on. So, just do it. 🙂

I hope local manufacturing may go the same route as gardening.

Agriculture was about 90% of the workforce in the USA in 1800, 50% in 1900, and 2% now. Manufacturing was 30% of the US workforce in 1950, and about 12% now (plus some imports, but overall produces much more). The end of work is upon us. The social and economic implications of that seem like a much bigger problem long term (especially as long as the right to consume organic food depends on having a job in a heavily automated economy that less and less needs any sort of human labor).

So, in that sense, the original issue raised (have a job in a network or do it yourself) is actually misleading. It may become, do it yourself if you have the land and capital and knowledge vs. starve if you are not on welfare (Marshall Brain’s Manna book) vs. have some significant social change towards a basic income or a gift economy (one blending local production and network production).

Anyway, it’s hard to analyze these problems in isolation. As above, robotics is changing the nature of agriculture in the USA. Were it not for cheap illegal immigrants and other trends like women joining the workforce, chances are we would have automated a lot more of agriculture decades ago. (Many people, including me, wanted to work on agricultural robots but there was no broad support for it.) Now that robots are getting so cheap and effective, they are getting even cheaper than illegal immigrants or desperate US Americans.

Some links to prove the point on robotics as happening now:

* “The Autonomous Grape-Vine Pruner

This is “A robot with a sophisticated vision system and sophisticated arms is able to prune grape vines on a twig-by-twig basis.”

* Here is a GPS driven tractor a village could share for plowing and harvesting (although sharing equipment in agriculture is problematical since usually everyone needs it at the same time for the same seasonal reasons):

* “Farming Robot – with great news and information about the evolution of farms to now include intelligent machines taking over much of the “grunt work”. Don’t believe us? Just have a look at our first of alternating videos…”

Still, robots allow other social arrangements. For example, dairy milking robots have been around for a while, and they allow one family to potentially run a large herd by themselves without as much early/late scheduling for milking.

* “VMS robotic milking” (There are other vendors of such systems; that’s just a great video.)

* More on milking robot systems here.

Supposedly the cows like the robot milking better. They can get milked whenever they want and the machinery is easier on the udders. Record keeping is better too.

* Here is a robot barn cleaner.

Those special purpose systems seem to be working well, but more general purpose robots in the field are still under development, so there still remains a lot to do in that area of agricultural robotics:

* “Field Robot Event 2008” (also this video)

In general, continually improving automation and new materials and new designs (often resulting from collaboration through the internet) means a lot of our economic and social assumptions will need to be revisited, and not just in rural areas. But it is silly to make social policy on something like agriculture without considering technological trends and even current realities.

For those on Franz Nahrada’s Global Villages blog, here is a related post I made a while back that touches on some of these issues.

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