by Dr. David Bell, Daily Sceptic:

We live in a world where oligarchs accumulate land, use their media assets to denigrate natural foods and invest in fake alternatives. On the other ‘side’, wealthy professionals calling themselves freedom fighters travel the world and the internet insisting we should eat organic and local. Meanwhile, the food security of many of the eight billion-plus of us remains at the mercy of the weather, diseases and insects. Neither side offers a viable solution or much benefit for many beyond themselves.

An increasing realisation of the corruption and greed that drives much of our New Normal is motivating a growing movement for self-sufficiency. Local sourcing of natural-grown foods is coupled with denigration of big agribusiness and industrialised food production. Incoherently, it is also often coupled with claims that those backing the big agribusiness enemy are aiming for depopulation, while the way in which small-scale agriculture will feed the world’s growing population is left unexplained.

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From the comfort of big jet planes made in huge factories, it is now possible to gain likes by posting photos of the organic and rather cute livestock we left back home. These can be supplemented with pictures of the Thai rice, Costa Rican coffee and Mexican avocados from our favorite brunch spot. This approach to food and agriculture is a hobby, and a good one. But the world cannot support eight billion such hobbies.

The other side of the agriculture coin has also been doing us harm: an obese population in rich countries with declining life expectancy, fat on industrial corn syrup, seed oils and other unnatural metabolism adulterators, coupled with declining physical activity. Nor are we benefiting from unevidenced claims that diets including meat or raw milk will somehow restart an age of plagues. Or that humans should transform themselves into insectivores.

Regulating independent family farmers out of business, with their generations of knowledge, is not a step forward either but a decimation of rural society and human dignity – of the reason for living in the first place. Replacing them with centralised fake food factories funded by wealthy investors and their pet celebrities will concentrate wealth rather than food security. To survive and thrive – all of us – we need to face the realities of growing and delivering huge quantities of healthy human food.

We feed far more, and live far better, than past Malthusians predicted because we grow more food and store and transport it more effectively than they thought we could. That is not an ‘elitist’ thing, it is quite the opposite. Like the rest of life, we need to continue to progress, but keep that progress in all our hands rather than a greed-driven few – which is the unavoidable challenge of all human progress, and a challenge our agencies are now failing. But in fighting for food freedom, we must still feed over eight billion. This means investing in large-scale farm machinery and supply and food management infrastructure – in large agricultural enterprises.

Living the rural dream

I live on a few acres, and this produces about 70% of my family’s food thanks to a lot of trudging through mud. We eat mostly our own meat, our own eggs (chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys), vegetables, and in season our own fruit and milk. If you have a good external income, and a few acres of well-watered fertile land, you can do this and still go to restaurants, drive a car, and travel for conferences and holidays. We are very fortunate. By the standard of most people on earth, highly privileged. It is hard work and stinks after rain, but it’s rewarding. It feel good to eat the fruit of your own labour.

We grow most of our own food partly for health reasons, partly to have something to rely on if things get really bad. We also do it because it is, at times, fun. In good months we also save money. Recently, a hurricane came through followed by three weeks of near continuous heavy rain. The cost of recovery just for the little land and fences we have is going to be well above the total market value of all our livestock, and probably negate two years of savings on groceries. We will recover because, in keeping with a minority of humanity, we have good external resources to draw on.

Hurricane aside, we have lost two breeding stock and one intended for the table in the past two months due to parasitic worm infestations (a curse of warm humid environments). We would have lost more without modern pharmaceuticals and supplementary (i.e., externally-purchased) stockfeed. If we could not afford the fence repairs, we would have no livestock at all. Our in-soil veggies and two fruit trees are also rotting due to the exceptionally wet weather. Last week another tree fell onto a fence, adrift in the hyper-saturated soil.

If we were really subsistence farmers, like most small-scale farmers are globally, we would now face starvation or the loss of our land and future income – like people in the West also did before the industrial revolution transformed agriculture, and as hundreds of millions in other countries still do. This is why we now have large farms with a lot of equipment: so that they can be resilient.

A friend nearby farms 6,000 acres of cereals. They plant out genetically modified seed, treat them with herbicides and pesticides at certain intervals and harvest when they are ripe and dry. This farming is extremely fossil fuel and labour intensive – ploughing, seeding, spraying, harvesting. Even with this, corn can grow fungus in the cobs or large acreages can be lost due to rain. They are completely at the mercy of the weather. Enough but not too much rain, and sun at the right time. With 6,000 acres owned or leased, a couple of families make a modest living. None, if it rains at harvest time.

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