This article is also available in audio as part of the Green Wave podcast.

Written by Francesco Ajena

Increasingly, ‘smart farming’ has been making its way into farms across Europe and onto the political agenda. The European Union appears willing to provide a suitable environment through policies and funds which strongly facilitate the development of smart farming and data-driven business models in agriculture. In the recent CAP legislative proposal, precision agriculture and digitalisation are praised by the agricultural Commissioner Phil Hogan as a great opportunity to develop rural communities and to increase the environmental and climate mitigation impact of farmers. A new focus on Farming Advisory Systems — structures providing the training of farmers — is intended to prepare farmers to this technological leap forward.

What is smart farming (or precision agriculture)?

Smart farming, or precision agriculture, is a modern farming management concept using digital techniques to monitor and optimise agricultural production processes. For example, rather than applying the same amount of fertilisers over an entire agricultural field or feeding a large animal population with equal amounts of feed, precision agriculture helps measure specific needs and adapt feeding, fertilising, pest control or harvesting strategies accordingly. The means of precision agriculture  consist mainly of a combination of new sensor technologies, satellite navigation, positioning technology and the use of mass amounts of data to influence decision-making on farms. The aim is to save costs, reduce environmental impact and produce more food.

Without a doubt, the promise of more efficient farming, higher yields, and environmental sustainability sounds very attractive. But some might wonder how such market-oriented technologies will impact the agricultural sector. While mega-machinery, chemical input and seed lobbies push to fund these innovations through CAP money, serious questions are raised about who has access to these technologies, who controls the data and what is the environmental performance of these innovations.

Is precision agriculture the way forward to sustainability?

Smart agriculture is described by many EU policy-makers as the answer to make agriculture sustainable. While it leaves no doubt that precision agriculture performs better than conventional agriculture from an environmental point of view, there seems to be confusion about what sustainability truly is. An increasing scientific consensus emerged over the years around the fact that sustainability should encompass ecological, economic, and social aspects. Under these aspects, a brief analysis shows the limits of the impacts precision agriculture shall have on sustainability.

First of all, this new paradigm ignores ecological processes, being simply based on models for optimising conventional production and creating unintended needs. For example, optimising chemical soil fertilisation and targeting the amount of pesticides to apply in a certain area are useful tools in a context of conventional production only. Precision farming may help to reduce fertilisers and pesticide use, but it fundamentally assumes a sterile soil and impoverished biodiversity. In contrast, in a balanced agroecosystem, a living soil works as a buffer for both pest and nutrient management, meaning there is no need to resort to pesticides and fertilisers.

Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit

Secondly, smart agriculture, as currently developed, is not economically sustainable for most of the farmers. For the last 50 years mainstream agricultural development has progressed along the trajectory of ‘more is better’, imposing top-down chemical and bio-technology and energy-intensive machines. The logic of increasing production at all costs has led farms to grow and pushed farmers into debt. European farms are disappearing, being swallowed by few big farms. From 2003 to 2013, more than one in four farms disappeared from the European landscape. Along the same paradigm, digitalisation risks putting farmers in more debt and dependency. Farmers would be led to buy machines and give up their data. The collected data will then be owned and sold on by the machinery companies to farmers. These new market-oriented technologies governed by the trend of pushing to commodify and privatise knowledge would increase dependency on costly tools, mostly unaffordable for smallholder farmers, accelerating their disappearance.

Finally, the precision agriculture approach is not socially sustainable. The knowledge transfer mode of precision agriculture mainly follows a top-down procedure where innovation comes from private companies that develop and provide technological solutions. Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit, fostering a path dependency, and ignoring the potential of practice, knowledge sharing and participatory research. Moreover, the promises of digital technology and the big data agenda are mainly addressed to conventional, industrial-scale agriculture, allowing them alone to thrive at the expense of smaller ones.

A smart and truly sustainable way of doing agriculture is already here

During the last decade, agroecology has known large success, sparking transition across all the EU. Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Through transdisciplinary, participatory, and transition-oriented research, agroeocology links together science, practice, and movements focusing on social change. While far from being an ‘agriculture of the past’, as some opponents have labelled it, agroecology combines scientific research and community-based experimentation, emphasising technology and innovation that are knowledge-intensive, low cost,and easily adaptable by small and medium-scale producers. Agroecology implies methodologies to develop a responsible innovation system that allows the technologies to respond to real user needs. It develops a systemic paradigm towards a full harmonisation with ecological processes, low external inputs,use of biodiversity, and cultivation of agricultural knowledge.

The resulting technology is as ‘smart’, ‘precise’ and performing as the one promoted by big data companies. Drip irrigation (a type of micro-irrigation), nitrogen fertilisation using mycorrhizal fungi, adaptive multi-paddock grazing systems (a management system in which livestock are regularly moved from one plot to another to avoid overgrazing), and bokashi composting (fermented organic matter) are just a few examples of advanced agroecologial technologies that correspond to the needs of adaptability, performance, and accessibility. Low-tech methods can be equally or more effective, are more appropriate for smaller or remote upland farms, and engender less debt or input dependency. The major part of equipment most of the farmers need is affordable, adaptable and easy to fix.

Are agroecology and digitalisation poles apart?

Considering the current agenda of big data and big machineries companies, yes, they are.But this does not mean digital innovations are unfit for agroecology. The main barrier to consider to the use of digital innovations in agroecology is related to their accessibility and the lack of autonomy of farmers. Agroecology is based on inclusiveness, it emphasises the importance of the dialogue between producers, researchers, and communities through participatory learning processes. A bottom-up approach, a horizontal integration, and a complete freedom of information are needed to support agroecological innovations.

Thus, opposing agroecology and digital technology would be critically wrong. Serious potential can be unlocked by combining digital tools to achieve the objectives of sustainable agricultural production. Farmer-to-farmer methods based on open-source information ruled by a horizontal exchange can be used to democratise the use of data. Crowd-sourced soil data can help farmers to share information and benefiting from it. An example of this is the app mySoil, which seeks to promote the distribution of freely available data through digital technologies. This project has developed a citizen science role for data collection, enabling users to upload their own observations about soils in their area. Sensors can help measure plant or animal needs, information can be transferred and shared among a farming community quickly, and new apps can help farmers selling their products directly and developing a more efficient community-based agriculture. The cost of specialised machines that manage sustainable soil cover and weeds, or composting, can be made affordable by promoting cooperative models and community connections among bioregions.

Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

Examples of collaborative projects for the creation of technology solutions and innovation by farmers, such as l’Atelier Paysan in France, can be found allover Europe. These local innovations require an enabling environment that Governments are failing to provide. Atelier Paysan is a network of farmers, scientists, and researchers that have developed a bottom-up approach to innovation in order to integrate farmers’ knowledge and the development of new technologies adapted to agroecological farming. The aim is to empower farmers to take back control on technical choices. The starting point is that farmers are in the best position to respond appropriately to the challenges of agricultural development. With the support of technical facilitators and building on transdisciplinary and collective intelligence, farmers develop appropriate and adapted innovations. The technology is developed and owned by farmers, and the investment and the benefits are collective. Adapting digital technology to similar processes can spark transition in a much more effective way than obsolete top-down and technocratic approaches. If we want real innovation, we need to start daring to innovate the innovation process itself.

Involving users in the design of agro-equipments, creating financial incentives for innovative equipment purchase, sharing costs among cooperatives and farming communities, and training end-users on the high potential of these new technologies are pivotal aspects of adapting digital tools to agroecological innovation. These processes need the support of public investment to scale up. This shall be the role of the new CAP, in order to make its huge money flow legitimate. CAP money should serve inclusive innovation, in order to develop accessible and adapted knowledge. During the upcoming CAP negotiations, the future of 38 per cent of the European budget will be decided. Public money must be spent for public goods. It is not a matter of what kind of technology we want to support for our agriculture; it is a matter of who will benefit from his technology, farmers or private companies.

This article has been reprinted from the Greeneuropeanjournal you can find the original post here!

The original post included an embedded podcast that was not reposted here.

Featured image: “Rt. 539 Hay Field” by James Loesch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The post AGRICULTURE 3.0 OR (SMART) AGROECOLOGY? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

On Sunday 9th of June, four selected makers presented their agricultural solutions at Tzoumakers, our rural makerspace in Kalentzi (Ioannina, Greece). The workshop has enabled participants to explore a new dimension in making, to increase their competences and to discover that open source solutions in agriculture can be developed through knowledge diffusion and collaboration for mutual benefit.

Here are photos of the four solutions:

The project will continue with a final promotion of two developed prototypes in a European design event. Updates will be provided on our Facebook page.

We want to thank all the participants and wish them all the best for their future!

The post End of the open source agriculture workshop appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I said in my last post that putting good software and data into the hands of farmers can profit a local economy, and I’d like to back up that claim a little. I also hinted that the direction in which such data flows is especially important in an increasingly globalized industry, where in a few years we could reasonably expect to see most of the world’s farming data owned by one or two multinational corporations. In order for farming communities to wrest some control over their own data, I believe it needs to originate with food producers, then travel outwardly along the supply chain to the consumers, who consume that data just as they would the food.

Those are some fairly abstract terms, and I won’t pretend they’re at all unbiased either. But I believe there’s some hard, practical rationale for why farmers can profit from controlling their own data, and I can put it in terms that any farmer with enough business-savvy can understand: data adds value to the product, which means more value for the consumer, which means a better price for the farmer. Let me explain.

The Value of Data

There are a lot of ways farmers already know to add value to the food they grow: washing and bunching vegetables, making a nice display and signage at market, investing in a refrigeration unit for one’s truck, canning sauce from unsold or surplus tomatoes, etc. All these measures avail the farmer a higher price at the point of sale, either by having a fresher, more marketable product when it arrives, or by creating a new market for a product that otherwise might not have sold. Most of this value also ships with the product, meaning the value will be propagated down the supply chain until it reaches its final destination, even if it passes through a few more hands before it does so.

Reliable farm data can do all these things and more. There are some metrics which the end consumer will obviously value, and farmers can leverage those for a higher price. If a farmer can provide accessible, verifiable data regarding when the product was harvested, how it was grown, what environmental impacts could be measured during its production and the specific seed variety it was grown from, then she will find a large market of customers willing to pay a premium for the food associated with that data. That kind of data can be especially valuable to distributors and other partners further down the supply chain, where normally such information becomes more obscure the further it travels. There’s also the mere ability to verify a product was grown by someone within a small radius of the consumer, assuring them that their dollars are staying in the local economy.

These are all sources of value that traditional methods can capture as well, if not quite with the same granularity and level of persistence; however, I think the real value will be in the predictive power that data can provide, to an extent that other value-added practices can’t really replicate. This comes in especially handy with larger buyers, who have their own downstream markets to be concerned about, and who would truly value knowing a yield within a few percentage points and a harvest window within a matter of a day or two, all from perhaps two weeks out or more. If a farmer has a reasonable expectation that demand will outstrip her yield, and can predict that reliably enough ahead of time, she can offer a guarantee of availability, at a premium, to any interested buyers who order in advance. If instead she anticipates overproduction, she can offer volume discounts to potential early buyers, so that once the harvest date rolls around that abundance will be at a more manageable volume.

Through API’s (Application Programming Interfaces), this data could be propagated to buyers automatically, and prices adjusted the same way. For instance, in the case of overproduction, the sale window could be set to close once a certain number of bushels had been sold. Or if a certain quota isn’t met for premium orders, the price could be lowered after a given time. All this will help guarantee the best price for the highest volume of sales. The availability of this data via API’s also means that, once again, the value can be easily passed down the supply chain. A wholesaler or retailer with an ecommerce business can have the data relayed automatically to their website, and thus to their own customers. A chef can post a new seasonal item on his menu a week or more in advance and start promoting it via social media.

The Protocol vs the Data, Public vs Private

This raises a potentially contentious point regarding what data is made public and what is kept private. This inevitably comes back to who owns the data in the first place, but plain data, technically, cannot be copyrighted or patented, so once someone has access to it, there’s nothing to prevent them from sharing it however they see fit. It’s more a matter of who owns the computer the data is stored on, and what terms of service they’ve negotiated with the user. In that sense, farm data also cannot be made open source in strictly the same way that software or other creative works can.¹

If farm data was made publicly available from one source, and then a third party copies that data, there is nothing holding that third party to make the data or its derivatives freely available via their own platform. This means if a farmer publishes the data related to their wholesale prices and volumes via a free API, a distributor who connects to that API can still restrict access to that data via their own website, even excluding the very same farmer who grew the product. So if that farmer wanted to see what kind of markups that distributor was applying to the original wholesale price, she might have to pay a subscription fee, or perhaps wouldn’t be able to view it at all. At the same time, this doesn’t exactly create any guarantees of transparency for the consumer, who might also be restricted. Perhaps the distributor just wouldn’t be incentivized to pass that data along to the end consumer at all. We can’t just assume that opening up the data will automatically create better markets for the farmer and more transparency for the consumer.

So I’d like to clarify the difference between the need for open standards and public API’s, which I believe are absolutely essential for a transparent food shed, versus the caution which should be exercised when pushing for all farm-related data to be made public. This will take a bit of understanding of how API’s are used to store and transmit data, so we can distinguish them from the data itself. For our purposes, I’ll emphasize that API’s are mainly just the processes by which data is transmitted and stored, not the data itself. It’s the way that one computer application communicates to another.

To use an example of a human interface, rather than an Application Programming Interface, consider the process by which you log into your email account and view your inbox. You go to a URL, perhaps https://mail.gmail.com, then when the login page loads, you click on the field called “Email Address”, type your address in, then click on the field called “Password” and type it, and finally press enter or click a button called “Submit”. After that you can view your inbox, and access different mail items by a similar series of clicks. The process is the same whether it’s your inbox or your friend’s or your bosses, even though you lack the credentials to access your boss’s Gmail account (presumably). What’s most important is the process: the succession of clicks, the names of the fields you enter your credentials into, and the order in which all that happens. You probably don’t think about all those steps, but they’re all critical to a successful login attempt; if you entered your password into the wrong field, or clicked on the wrong button, you wouldn’t get to see your inbox.

API’s have similar protocols for accessing data and authenticating users, but instead of using a series of mouse clicks and keyboard entries, it uses a programming language. Like the human interface, the API is the same no matter who is logging in, and no matter the contents of their inbox. The only exceptions are the actual characters that make up your email and password, because they are themselves a type of data. They’re input data, whereas your inbox is output data. The interface needs to be flexible and generic enough to accept different inputs and respond with different outputs. If it just assumed the input data was the same every time, that the email and password were the same for everyone, then everyone would have the same inbox. This is why it’s important for any API to separate the data from the process. This also means that the process can be made public, while the data, including your password or an email from your significant other, can be kept private. Any programmer can access the Gmail API to write their own email app, but that doesn’t mean they can access your password or inbox. The same can be achieved with farm data, separating public API’s from the private data.

None of this means that there aren’t cases where it would be desirable to make certain farm data public, and perhaps expose that data over an API that is free for anyone to use, with or without credentials. But farmers, as both individuals and as businesses, have a reasonable expectation of privacy over some portion of the their data, just as a Gmail user expects the contents of their inbox will be kept (reasonably) private. Once a farmer puts a product onto the market, there are more compelling reasons to make some of that data public. For instance, it benefits both the farmer and the consumer at that point to have some level of transparency about the growing practices, freshness of the product, price, etc. Public API’s and open data can provide such transparency. Still, I think there is a strong case for leaving trade secrets, personal info, and other types of pre-market data at the discretion of the farmer to publish, whether freely or for a price, so she can thereby leverage that data for the type of value-added services I mentioned above. There needs to be a delicate balance struck between making our local farmers more competitive in a globalized market, while also making that market more transparent for the consumer.

Keeping Data in the Community

I think there is a huge need to talk about how we decide what parts of this data should be made public and what kept private, and I don’t expect to put much of a dent into that discussion here. I will assert, however, that this is something that should be decided at the community level, between farmers and the people eating their food. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the course we are currently taking.

As is well known by now, the trend among Big Data companies, like Facebook and Google, is to provide users with a nominally “free” or inexpensive service in exchange for the data they’re able to collect from those users. A similar trend is already taking over in digital agriculture, especially as big mergers like the one between Bayer and Monsanto aggregate more and more data into fewer and fewer hands. Angela Huffman, an advocate for anti-monopoly reform in the agriculture, writes in the Des Moines Register that the newly approved conglomerate “will have more in common with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica than meets the eye.” She goes on to say,

In recent years, large agrochemical companies, including Bayer and Monsanto, have been heavily investing in digital agriculture. This new platform involves collecting data from farms, then building mathematical models and algorithms aimed at giving farmers real-time information on how to grow and manage their crops. […] It stands to reason that if Bayer and Monsanto combine to increase their dominance over digital farming, they will use their near monopoly on farmer data to sell more of their chemicals and seeds to farmers.

This new data system, as it’s evolving, favors a dynamic where farmers get cheap services for analyzing their crop data, in exchange for giving away that data to Big Ag, instead of having the chance to leverage that data themselves. These services usually come bundled together with other products, like seeds, fertilizers and even tractors.

In 2015, John Deere & Company told a farmer that he would be breaking the law if he tried to fix his own tractor by accessing the firmware that controlled a faulty sensor. When it failed, that one inconsequential sensor would shut down the entire tractor and halt his farm’s production for two days while he waited for the replacement part to arrive. Cynics and digital rights advocates alike all thought this boiled down to Deere’s agreements with licensed repair shops and parts dealers, but Deere’s rationale for withholding the source code turned out to be something a lot more lucrative, as Cory Doctorow points out (video):

The first thing that happens when a Deere tractor runs around your field is that it does centimeter-accurate soil surveys using the torque sensors in the wheels. And that data is not copyrightable, because facts aren’t copyrightable in America. […] But because the only way you can get access to those facts is by jailbreaking the tractor and removing a thing that protects access to copyrighted works, which is the operating system on the tractor itself, […] it’s a felony to access that data unless you’re John Deere. So John Deere pulls that data in over the wireless network connections in these tractors, and then they bundle it all together and they sell it to a seed company. And if you want to use the centimeter accurate soil surveys of your fields to do automated, optimized seed broadcasting you have to buy seed from the one company² that licenses it. […] But it’s actually just the tip of the iceberg because if you are doing centimeter accurate soil surveys of entire regions you have insight into crop yields way ahead of the futures market. And that’s why John Deere committed PR-suicide by telling the Farmers of America that they didn’t own their tractors, that they were tenant farmers.

This case study in bad agricultural data policy perfectly highlights the concerns we should have for how farm data is used and collected, starting quite literally from the ground up. Before the seed even meets the soil, all of a farmer’s most critical data — which brings with it the power to increase yields, decrease waste and command a better price at market — is being siphoned away to large corporate data stores half a world away. Then the derivatives of that data are sold back to the same farmer who generated it with every pass of his tractor. We can’t blame Big Ag for concocting such a clever scheme to profit its shareholders, but we can learn from it. We can learn to take active measures to restore control of that data back to the local communities where it originated, and with it, return all the value it held.

We as consumers should also have a chance to say how this data is used. Do we want this data to boost the sales of the chemicals which run off into our backyards and are responsible for emitting one third of humanity’s annual contribution of CO2 into the atmosphere? Or do we want to leverage the full potential of farm data to eventually render the extensive farming technologies of last century obsolete, replacing them with smarter, cleaner, more efficient technologies that could save us from environmental catastrophe in this century?

An Alternative Model

Instead of being forced to buy seed from the only company that is licensed to provide services like precision planting, under a different model a farmer could shop around for seed companies that provide other data services. These services would include the ability to import seed data into the farmer’s preferred crop planning software at the time of purchase. Soil surveys could be taken with sensor widgets, which could be installed cheaply on even the oldest, non-computerized tractors and would include their own light-weight, off-grid networking capabilities. This data, combined with the integrated seed data, could be sent to publicly funded university extension programs, who could analyze that data and provide services to help farmers calibrate their machinery to optimize planting.

The benefits of this system over the John Deere model would be numerous. The farmer would get higher yield from each seed planted, which is a tremendous value in its own right, but retrofitting such hardware could also present significant cost savings, compared to the price of a new tractor with computer diagnostics built-in, some of which reach seven figures. Such an arrangement would also provide data to public research institutions, who could be trusted to anonymize and aggregate the data from a wider distribution of growers, and could publish the results of their analysis for others to use. Instead being used to push chemicals, this data could aid research into new intensive growing practices that are better for the environment, and could even help monitor the total soil health of vital growing regions. Plus, if anything ever happened to the sensors, they could be easily repaired by any third party, or by the farmer herself, because they would be built with open source hardware and software.

This data would continue to profit the farmer when she brought the product to market. Instead of giving Bayer/Monsanto the trade insights to hedge on commodities markets, the farmer could use this data herself to get the best price possible. Over time, the data from these soil surveys could be used to train programs that optimize prices, just as the extension’s analytical programs were optimized for planting. The planting data itself could be correlated with data from the National Weather Service to calculate the growing degree days necessary for each crop to reach full maturity. This would have a tremendous pricing advantage if the farmer could start offering more reliable delivery dates. Additional sensors on the farm could make these predictions even more precise, and if it was known that favorable weather conditions in her own micro-climate could bring her crop to market even a few days before other nearby farms, that could provide a real competitive edge.

Again, as I suggested above, forward-thinking distributors and retailers could receive this data and forward it to end consumers. The consumers would be able to anticipate having the spring’s first snap peas or strawberries weeks in advance, and could count down the days on the calendar. They could know when they were harvested and know just how many hours they spent in transit before reaching their table. That transit time could be reduced by innovative software for food hubs, and CSA programs and farmers markets, which could all pull data from such crop planning software and pass along the value.

We shouldn’t be skeptical about the technology itself — that it seems too futuristic or that modern farms wouldn’t have a practical use for it. That technology is certainly coming and will be used. A lot of it has already arrived. We should be skeptical about how that technology will be used, and who it will favor. Ultimately, whoever controls the data will determine where the value of that data flows. Will it all go to a few private interests and controlling shareholders? Or will it benefit the people growing the food, and those who are nourished by that food, as well as the environment that food depends on to grow? That is not a decision the technology will make for us, and it most certainly won’t be an easy one to make or execute. It’s a choice, nevertheless, which we need to make as a community, and it’s one we need to make soon, before others make the decision for us.

¹ There is, of course, a corresponding Open Data movement, which shares a lot in common with Open Source, but in a legal sense it operates entirely differently. Also, there is a myriad of different legal interpretations that I’m glossing over here, but a good primer, if you’re curious, is Feist v. Rural Telephone.

² Doctorow indicates that this seed company is in fact Monsanto, but I have been unable to verify that claim through other sources.

Originally published at jgaehring.com.

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The selection of the designers was made by members of the local community, informed by the following criteria:

• Does the solution fit with the values and principles of small-scale farming systems?
• Is the solution developed according to expressed user needs?
• Is the solution easily reproduced and adaptable?

The selected designers who will lead the manufacturing of 4 prototypes during the workshop are:

• Andrè Rocha, Adjunct Professor at ESELx-IPL and a senior product and interaction designer.
• Aurèle Macé, Assistant Researcher in the Sony CSL Sustainability team with a focus on open-source robotic systems.
• Iason Pantazis, Architect and co-founder of Fab Lab Ioannina.
• Lakis Ioannou, Maker and beekeeper.

We wish to thank all applicants for their contributions. The workshop will take place from June 5 to June 9 at our rural makerspace “Tzoumakers” in Kalentzi, NW Greece. It will be open for everyone so we hope you join us!

This event is organised in the context of the Distributed Design Market Platform Creative Europe project.

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Towards a New Reconstruction: Land, Racism, and Economic Emancipation

While in New York, we attended the 38th Annual E.F. Schumacher Lectures in Great Barrington, MA. The birthplace of W.E.B. Du Bois, Great Barrington was an ideal place for these lectures and discussions. W.E.B. Du Bois is a hero to the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, the host of this lecture, whose mission is to envision a just and sustainable global economy, apply the concepts locally, and share the results for broad use.

(To add an interesting footnote to this history and Du Bois’s work, Agrarian Trust’s Director, Ian McSweeney, told us of the personal connection an ancestor of his had to Du Bois. Ian’s great-great grandfather’s brother, Edward F. McSweeney, was a collaborator with and supporter of W.E.B. Du Bois. Edward F. McSweeney wrote the introduction to “The Gift of Black Folk,” corresponded with Du Bois, and advocated for increased immigration.)

The lectures celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Du Bois, who was the first black man to receive a PhD from Harvard, a founder of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, author of massive scholarly works and books, and a steadfast advocate for the rights of disenfranchised people. On a cold, rainy day in Great Barrington, Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm and Ed Whitfield of the Fund for Democratic Communities built on the legacy Du Bois left this world by speaking about cooperative structures, equitable land access, and black economic development. Penniman works to end racism in the food system, and Whitfield is committed to developing non-extractive finance models and investment structures that enable community self-determination and supporting reparations.

Economic Justice & Redirecting Community Wealth

“We need not think our task is expansion of capital but expansion of community wealth,” Whitfield shared during his talk. By understanding and identifying how community wealth has been generated and managed, he suggested, we can redirect it to elevate the quality of life for all. The Southern Reparations Loan Fund, where Whitfield is a board member, is developing a “financial commons” to enable democratic access to non-extractive financing. Non-extractive financing works by providing working capital to enterprises that build local wealth through worker ownership without collateral or debt. Instead, models like Southern Reparations Loan Fund provide coaching with the capital, and loans are paid back when a project succeeds. This way, financial capital is a tool for communities and workers, rather than the other way around.

For decades, Whitfield has shown an unflagging commitment to true and lasting economic justice for all. What does this kind of justice look like? Is it that we can choose what kind of fast food we want or that we can afford to choose healthy food? Whitfield has no problem with questioning everything, even old parables that we often repeat without thinking, in order to uncover deeper truth and more meaning. (See, for example, this video from the New Economy Coalition: “Ed Whitfield on why the ‘teaching a man to fish’ parable is a lie.”)

Whitfield cautions against “compromising with a corrupt system [which] takes away our humanity.” He asserts that we must organize to create new models and shift our paradigms to ensure that every person has a chance to be fully human, which includes a chance to benefit from the product of their labor and be productive, expressing their dignity through their work. Our collective work must be an engine for social equality and justice, where the wealth that is created elevates the quality of life for our communities.  

Last year, I read Ed Whitfield’s piece at Fund for Democratic Communities called “Nevermind Guaranteed Income, We Want the Cow.” It is bold, and I was glad when he readdressed the concepts during the lecture. The cliffnotes are that guaranteed annual income serves to give citizens more access to consume. In doing so, it greases the wheels of capitalism and enables those with power and resources to obtain more through the same system, changing nothing about how labor is organized or how wealth is distributed. Whitfield illustrates with a story from Rev. Bugani Finca who played a role in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation efforts. The story goes that Tabo, whose cow was stolen, gets an apology from Mr. Smith, the thief. After reconciliation, Tabo says, “Well, what about the cow?” To which Mr. Smith replies: “You are ruining our reconciliation. This has nothing to do with a cow!” Without the means to produce (the cow in this case), power and resources are simply retained by the Mr. Smiths. Disparities increase between those who’ve taken the resources and those whose resources have been stolen.

So, what does all this mean for our work at Agrarian Trust? First, we will listen to those “thrown away,” exploited, excluded, and otherwise oppressed by the old economy and commit to working together to build a new economy that works for all of us. Land held in commons will also serve as a base, a shared resource for this new economy and for disenfranchised people.

“Once the earth belonged to us all, but it is now ‘owned’ by a few who exploit its resources and determine the conditions for its use. They own the community’s wealth that was generated by the labor of us all,” says Whitfield. We whole-heartedly agree when he affirms that “land is foundation, water is life, air is essential, life on earth is sacred. Everything else is human social production which should be instrumental to the sacred. Somehow, though the expansion of capital has used up the air, water, and earth. We’ve got it backwards. It’s stupid!” Using community wealth to regenerate the earth and enrich all that is sacred, our humanity very much included, is how an agrarian commons will sustain itself and its communities.

The Facts of Food Apartheid: Our Food System Isn’t Broken—It’s Working Just As Intended

Our food system needs a redesign if it’s to feed us without perpetuating racism and oppression. After decades of discrimination by the federal government, Black farmers have lost almost all of our land. Reparations for past harm are the first step to justice. Ultimately, we are working toward food sovereignty, where all people exercise the right to control our own food systems—including in cities.”

– Leah Penniman, “4 Not-So-Easy-Ways to Dismantle Racism in the Food System, in YES! Magazine, April 2017

Penniman began her talk by sharing how she was not one for theory without practice or without very physical, tangible work. Anyone who hears her speak can discern that a deep ethical framework informs her labor, but it’s also reinforced with on-the-ground effort and the love she puts into her work. Her connection to her community and ancestors plays a central role in her organizing and her many expressions of both written and spoken word. As she says, [it is] Western to wonder who THE person with THE idea was—it’s a community always.”

With this spirit, she asked us to reflect on how our accomplishments and capacity came from those before us, inviting us to name an ancestor whose efforts, big or small, enabled us to be here. Penniman grounded us further by acknowledging the original stewards of the land that the place we call “Great Barrington” today is a part of—the Mohicans. We then traveled briefly through our history to explore some of the repercussions that are still with us today in the United States. To name just one major influence of our colonial past, consider that Manifest Destiny, or the Doctrine of Discovery—the ridiculous and life-threatening notion that wherever you plant a flag, the land is yours—is still very much in play today. Even recently, a Supreme Court case (City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York) held that reacquired land, bought by the Oneida Indian Nation, could not return to reservation status and tribal sovereignty due to the standards of “federal equity.” This is especially ironic considering the legal meaning of equity in civil procedure in this case. Our historical memory suffers from amnesia across the United States, so it is no surprise that these repercussions are largely allowed by those in power.

We also traveled to Africa, where Africans were kidnapped to be slaves in the colonies. Those that were kidnapped were often people with deep knowledge of tropical and subtropical agriculture. They were the agricultural experts that the captors needed to make their plantations profitable in the American South. We then moved through the Jim Crow era (and the rootlets of the New Jim Crow today) where people continued to be enslaved for petty crimes, some of which weren’t real crimes at all. Not having a job was considered a crime in the 19th century in some jurisdictions, and therefore, newly freed black people could be imprisoned and then leased out to plantation owners. Money from the leases went to the states, keeping the southern economy intact during the Reconstruction era. Scholar Douglas Blackmon refers to this practice as “slavery by another name,” in his Pulitzer-prize winning book and PBS documentary by the same title.  

Despite this neo-enslavement, black people still managed to save enough money to purchase 60 million acres of land by 1914. Now this land is almost gone. When so much of what was lost hasn’t been recognized, or even understood by most Americans, the past will continue wreaking havoc on attempts to create equity today. When what was lost is almost entirely controlled by white families—98% of U.S. farmland is controlled by people of European descent—it is no wonder the wealth gap continues to widen dramatically, reaching a ratio of more than 13:1 in the white to black median net worth of households.

At the peak of black land ownership, white supremacist violence escalated. Violence and intimidation was targeted at black landowners, typically during harvest time. That way, black people could be arrested and leased to white farmers during harvest. The Great Migration north of 6 million black people seeking to escape this violence was, in fact, as Penniman reframes it, a refugee crisis. For many black people, it was not a choice to leave the land; it was necessity. What they met in the north was insidious—redlining, an inability to secure loans, both de jure and de facto segregation, deeply entrenched patterns of racial discrimination. How does one keep the product of her labor or realize its full value without the fundamental basis of wealth in the U.S., property ownership? How can the wealth gap numbers stop widening when so much of what was lost hasn’t been returned?

Today, both producers and consumers, including all of us, participate in maintaining a food system that relies on stolen land and stolen labor. Many aspects of industrial food production, processing, aggregation, and distribution are so dehumanizing that we have internationalized and turned to ‘cheap labor’ to prop up injust, unsustainable industries. Not only is industrial agriculture dehumanizing, but it can be dangerous. The highest level of workplace injury and death in agriculture is from pesticide exposure. Predictably, the food this system produces is harming all of us, too. Despite the U.S. having enormous wealth and resources, including the largest economy in the world, diet-related diseases are at an all time high. Many communities live in what have been called ‘food deserts,’ but food apartheid, a concept described by farmer/activist Karen Washington, is the proper term for what we see in communities as a result of our current food system. It’s human-created, not naturally occurring. To paraphrase Penniman and her retelling of the Iroquois origin story involving Sky Woman’s gift of corn to humanity, “we are taking the gift and turning it into a weapon [through monocropping, GMOs, corn syrup, suing indigenous farmers over seeds, and more].”

Just as racism and violence have ripped families and communities apart since colonial times in this country, there has been strength, wisdom, morality, and innovation countering it, ever seeking to create something new and life-giving. Much of this counter-narrative and practice has been nurtured from within black culture and communities. As Whitfield says, “As long as oppressive systems and concentrated power exist, we will always have to do some resistance and advocacy work, but we need to remember that the goal is for us to organize ourselves to be the power within our own lives and communities. We must create the world we want to live in by doing for ourselves.”

Just in the past century in agriculture: George Washington Carver was the first professor to teach organic agriculture, very much like we know it today. Booker T. Whatley developed innovations that led to the CSA and pick-your-own models before they were well-known. A history of cooperatives isn’t complete without Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperative, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and many more.

Building the Agrarian Commons

How can Agrarian Trust operate responsibly to undo the practices that our country’s history has enabled? How can our models be adapted to the needs of displaced and marginalized people seeking to reconnect to land?

This process of inquiry and action will start by listening to and working alongside those directly affected with an understanding that our humanity and liberation are bound together. Part of this process requires that we also consider our organization’s own demographics. Agrarian Trust currently has a small staff of four white people who live and work primarily on the East Coast and in the Southeast. We work in collaboration with many other organizations, large and small, many of which are also geographically widespread and racially diverse. It’s important for us to deeply and routinely think through how we can best play our roles individually and as a team in building racial equity and supporting social justice.

We believe in creating a world we all want to live in, a world that serves the well-being of all of humanity and the earth. Our agrarian commons models seek to provide opportunities for communities to be productive and build wealth and collective power through mutual interdependence. In other words, we believe in securing the cow, not just a supply of butter. An agrarian commons can contribute to democratizing community wealth, enabling communities to be their own “community developers.”

Specifically, we are working toward many local “Agrarian Commons” throughout the U.S. where local communities collectively hold title to land and grant equitable, long-term tenure to farmers. Creating a structure to return equity and self determination to communities, individuals, and the land itself, our commons example includes Boards comprised of local communities, farmers holding tenure on the farms held in commons, local stakeholders, and other local community organizations. Agrarian Trust believes we must use our position and power to create local land holding justice that begins to address inequities.

It’s a constant process of inquiry to create a new story, a new economy. But we can’t change the story, and all the policies and actions that stem from it, until we ask the right questions and uncover the truth. Thank you, Leah Penniman, Ed Whitfield, and the communities that support you, for sharing the truths that will inform our collective work.

Further Reading & Resources:

• Farming While Black, Leah Penniman (2018)
• Principles of Black Political Economy, Lloyd Hogan (1984)
• The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
• A more in-depth look at the issues we attempt to share here, as told by Leah Penniman, in The New Food Economy’s interview: https://newfoodeconomy.org/food-apartheids-farming-while-black-leah-penniman-soul-fire-farm-interview/.

Reposted from Agrarian Trust.

The post Building an Agrarian Commons: Learning from Farmers & Community Organizers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Jose Luis Vivero-Pol (Editor), Tomaso Ferrando (Editor), Olivier De Schutter (Editor), Ugo Mattei (Editor)

From the scientific and industrial revolution to the present day, food – an essential element of life – has been progressively transformed into a private, transnational, mono-dimensional commodity of mass consumption for a global market. But over the last decade there has been an increased recognition that this can be challenged and reconceptualized if food is regarded and enacted as a commons.

This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. Chapters do not define the notion of commons but engage with different schools of thought:

• the economic approach, based on rivalry and excludability;
• the political approach, recognizing the plurality of social constructions and incorporating epistemologies from the South;
• the legal approach that describes three types of proprietary regimes (private, public and collective) and different layers of entitlement (bundles of rights); and
• the radical-activist approach that considers the commons as the most subversive, coherent and history-rooted alternative to the dominant neoliberal narrative.

These schools have different and rather diverging epistemologies, vocabularies, ideological stances and policy proposals to deal with the construction of food systems, their governance, the distributive implications and the socio-ecological impact on Nature and Society.

The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings.

Reviews

“If you want to understand why the commons isn’t tragic, what gastronomy has to do with a democracy or what the practice and theory of a future food system might look like, this wonderful collection of essays is well worth reading.” — Raj Patel, food scholar, communicator and author of Stuffed and Starved, 2013 and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2018

“The adoption of a holistic and complex vision of gastronomy is the only way to restore the true value of food. It is not only about production and consumption, but also wisdom, memory, knowledge and spirituality, traditional practices and modern technologies combined in an ecological interconnection between people and the planet. This book starts a needed and welcome reflection on the change in paradigm, and traces a possible pathway towards food sovereignty.” — Carlo Petrini, founder and president of the international Slow Food movement and the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Italy

“If we are really to transform the food system, we need bold ideas. Food as commons is one of them. If you are serious about exploring new ways of fixing the food system, read this book.” — Professor Corinna Hawkes, Director, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London, UK and Co-Chair of the Independent Expert Group of the Global Nutrition Report

“Finally, a rich and rigorous assessment of food as a commons! This landmark collection of essays reveals how much we need to rethink the very language and frameworks by which we understand food and agriculture. The food we eat is not a mere commodity, it is the cherished, complicated outcome of culture, history, vernacular practice, ecological relationships, and identity. Insights on these themes can help us build new food systems that are stable, fair, and enlivening.” — David Bollier, scholar and activist on the commons, author of Think Like a Commoner, 2014 and co-editor of The Wealth of the Commons, 2012

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: the food commons are coming

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier de Schutter and Ugo Mattei

PART I: REBRANDING FOOD AND ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION

2. The idea of food as a commons: multiple understandings for multiple dimensions of food

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol

3. The food system as a commons

Giacomo Pettenati, Alessia Toldo and Tomaso Ferrando

4. Growing a care-based commons food regime

Marina Chang

5. New roles for citizens, markets and the state towards an open-source agricultural revolution

Alex Pazaitis and Michel Bauwens

6. Food security as a global public good

Cristian Timmermann

PART II: EXPLORING THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF FOOD

7. Food, needs and commons

John O´Neill

8. Community-based commons and rights systems

George Kent

9. Food as cultural core: human milk, cultural commons and commodification

Penny Van Esterik

10. Food as a commodity

Noah Zerbe

PART III: FOOD-RELATED ELEMENTS CONSIDERED AS COMMONS

11. Traditional agricultural knowledge as a commons

Victoria Reyes-García, Petra Benyei and Laura Calvet-Mir

12. Scientific knowledge of food and agriculture in public institutions: movement from public to private goods

Molly D. Anderson

13. Western gastronomy, inherited commons and market logic: cooking up a crisis

Christian Barrère

14. Genetic resources for food and agriculture as commons

Christine Frison and Brendan Coolsaet

15. Water, food and climate commoning in South African cities: contradictions and prospects

Patrick Bond and Mary Galvin

PART IV: COMMONING FROM BELOW: CURRENT EXAMPLES OF COMMONS-BASED FOOD SYSTEMS

16. The ‘campesino a campesino’ agroecology movement in Cuba: food sovereignty and food as a commons

Peter M. Rosset and Valentín Val

17. The commoning of food governance in Canada: pathways towards a national food policy?

Hugo Martorell and Peter Andrée

18. Food surplus as charitable provision: obstacles to re-introducing food as a commons

Tara Kenny and Colin Sage

19. Community-building through food self-provisioning in Central and Eastern Europe: an analysis through the food commons framework

Bálint Balázs

PART V: DIALOGUE OF ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION

20. Can food as a commons advance food sovereignty?

Eric Holt-Giménezand Ilja van Lammeren

21. Land as a commons: examples from United Kingdom and Italy

Chris Maughan and Tomaso Ferrando

22. The centrality of food for social emancipation: civic food networks as real utopias projects

Maria Fonte and Ivan Cucco

23. Climate change, the food commons and human health

Cristina Tirado-von der Pahlen

24. Food as commons: towards a new relationship between the public, the civic and the private

Olivier de Schutter, Ugo Mattei, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol and Tomaso Ferrando,

Text sourced from Routledge.com

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Pasquale Marzocchella: Rural Social Innovation Declaration is an elaborative document of Rural HUB research project. This is a testimony-rich document that explains the development process of a new rural economy. The new rural economy seeks ways to reappropriate a market-based economy, to be re-organized as a community-based economy, where the value of the product also encompassed social, environmental, and economic impact.

The post Rural Social Innovation: the Declaration appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Analysis: Many Americans are turning to sustainable farming operations to enrich their communities and personal lives. While these enterprises can be economically precarious, small-scale food production helps foster many cooperative and sustainability-oriented values.

Having committed to such sustainable practices, some would see worker cooperatives as a natural next step for small farm operations. But beginning farmers largely choose traditional business models such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, and LLCs. Rachel Armstrong, founder and executive director of Farm Commons (where I used to work) says this is because “beginning farmers get advice from people they trust, and those people did it the traditional way. They say ‘I did it this way, and it worked.'” They might even see worker cooperatives as “a solution in search of a problem,” Armstrong says, although Farm Commons is one of a few organizations seeking cooperative solutions to the challenges small farms face finding adequate seasonal labor.

Perhaps an even deeper barrier, Armstrong says, is the cultural ideal of the American farmer emphasizing individuality and singular leadership, a sense that “I am doing this myself.” Even young, sustainability-oriented farmers may feel drawn toward traditional ownership models.

Cracks are emerging in that orientation. Luis Sierra, assistant director of the California Center for Cooperative Development (CCCD), says that requests from farmers to help form worker cooperatives are slowly increasing — emerging organically from communities rather than from the evangelism of the cooperative and new economy movement. “People have brought these ideas to us rather than us going out and looking to promote farms as worker co-ops,” he says. “Young farmers who have finished their internships have started to look at farms as possible co-op ventures.” Recently, leading cooperative advocates Democracy at Work and the National Young Farmers Coalition co-created “An Introduction to Worker Cooperatives for Farmers and Start Ups.”

Success stories can help, like the worker-owned CSA whose subscriber base went from 20 to 80 members ($3,000 to $12,000 per month) in just one year. Urban farm operations may be natural places for worker ownership to crop up, and the cities needn’t be huge: Wellspring Harvest, a worker-owned hydroponic greenhouse, serves Springfield, Massachusetts, with a population of just over 150,000.

Beyond their viability as business models, worker-and-farmer-owned cooperatives also give sustainable farmers more room to live and farm their values. Solidarity Farms in Pauma Valley, California, describes itself as “a worker-owned family farm with spunk,” and seeks to address immigrant farmworker exploitation by co-creating “a more equitable model where we share equally in the rewards and struggles of the business.” Perhaps the most striking impact worker-owned and managed farms can have on communities is found in Eugene, Oregon, where Huerto de la Familia (“The Family Garden”) has grown from a six-member women’s community garden project to a nonprofit umbrella for small farm and food businesses throughout the city. They offer business classes and family food sustainability to the economically marginalized.

Worker democracy is also compatible with the reciprocity and balance of ecosystems and community food systems. “The farms we’ve been working with have been very small in scale,” Sierra says, adding that each member-owner is in charge of a venture like greenhouse manager or orchard manager, and all are available to help as needed.

Sierra and Armstrong both say a lot of work still needs to be done developing viable practices for worker-owned farms. The biggest challenge is the long-term economic security of workers. In traditional family farms,security “comes from real estate, the sale of land,” Sierra says. Generating consistent profits is necessary for any business to maintain decent retirement programs, but many farms aren’t profitable year in and year out.

This may be an unavoidable contradiction between cooperation and sustainability on one side and doing business in a capitalist economy on the other, but organizations like CCCD, Farm Commons, and others are working on finding new solutions on issues like retirement security, compensation for equipment, and other investments.

The success of any worker-run farms will spread because it’s easier to be a cooperative entity in places where there are a lot of other cooperative entities, Armstrong points out. As interest grows in both sustainable farming and worker democracy, there is hope for increased synergy between the two movements.

Photo by afagen

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The P2P Lab is happy to announce the launch of

“The cultiMake project: Crowdsourcing open source agricultural solutions”,

celebrating the gathering of designers, makers and farmers who are adapting to the digitised world.

Where: Habibi.Works, Ioannina (Greece)

When: From Monday, July 30th to Friday, August 3rd.

Currently, the P2P Lab aims to create awareness and promote an emerging collaborative productive model of agriculture, based on the conjunction of commons-based peer production with desktop manufacturing. Agriculture is a key activity in the peripheral and less-developed regions of the EU and a crucial productive sector. It is a field in which ready-to-apply open source hardware and software solutions have already been produced and, thus, can be implemented and improved. Considering the fragmentation of the existing abundant open source projects in relation to agriculture, the replication, sharing and improvement of solutions is hindered.

To facilitate interaction and create feedback loops among makers, designers and farmers, the P2P Lab is organising this 5-day event in Ioannina (Greece). The event will be hosted at Habibi.Works, a makerspace for asylum seekers and Greek locals in Katsikas (Ioannina), managed by the German NGO Soup and Socks e.V. Since 2016, Habibi.Works is operating eight workshop areas which serve as platforms for mutual education, empowerment and encounter.

The main aim is to familiarise the local community with open source technologies developed within the EU and, ideally, connect hubs (e.g. Fab Labs) that provide technical infrastructures for development. This may create a network of open source software/hardware communities and local farmers that overcome barriers through knowledge diffusion and collaboration for their mutual benefit.

During the workshop, four solutions related to agriculture will be manufactured. After publishing an open call and receiving several applications, the local community selected the following designers to lead the manufacturing of the prototypes:

• André Rocha, Adjunct Professor at ESELx – IPL and a Senior Product and Interaction designer.
• Angelos Pappas, Software developer and activist.
• Jonathan Minchin, Coordinator of the Green Fab Lab at Valldaura Labs, IAAC Campus in Barcelona.
• Trifonas Papaioannou, Maker and beekeeper.

The selection of the designers was informed by the following criteria:

• Does the solution create value for small-scale farmers and society?
• Does the solution express empathy to user needs?
• Is the solution visionary and paves the way for others?

The workshop will be open for everyone so we hope you join us there.

For queries, you may contact us at [email protected]

This event is organised in the context of the Distributed Design Market Platform Creative Europe project.

Organised by

Supported by

Photo by efou222

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When it comes to repair, farmers have always been self reliant. But the modernization of tractors and other farm equipment over the past few decades has left most farmers in the dust thanks to diagnostic software that large manufacturers hold a monopoly over. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard goes to Nebraska to talk to the farmers and mechanics who are fighting large manufacturers like John Deere for the right to access the diagnostic software they need to repair their tractors.

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