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.
LISTEN TO THE CONVERSATION ON:
In this conversation 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. We also talk about other possible ways forward. If highly manufactured foods are a naive solution destined to fail, what are the pathways forward in a future where cheap fossil fuels are no longer available? Smaller- scale, diversified farms make way more sense. How do we organise ourselves? What about the commons? How do we make this work without getting naive and romantic ourselves? Maybe we should get more romantic about food and agriculture.
THE BIG ENERGY ISSUES WITH HIGH ENERGY INPUT IN MANUFACTURED FOODS
Decarbonising the food system requires considering the energetic requirements of agriculture, which can be massive.
”The real problem with it, from a technical point of view, I think, is, well, several problems with it. The one I focus on most 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. 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 present fossil fuel civilisation.” Chris Smaje
”When you compute the energetic requirements, I mean, I calculated, and I think it’s an underestimate for all sorts of reasons, something like 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 have 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 decarbonising anyway. So, I think, from a sort of energy futures and climate change point of view, it doesn’t really stack up.” Chris Smaje
RURAL VS. URBAN
Chris argues that ruralisation may not be sustainable due to high energy costs, but the picture is way more complex.
”I guess this whole debate is a bit caught up on the difference between cost and efficiency […] We can unpack the details of that, which might be true, but it’s actually that we need to be looking at costs, not just efficiency, and it’s the same with urbanism. You can lead a high- energy modern life more efficiently in an urban setting than in a rural setting. If everyone in the countryside needs to have a car or needs a heater, a detached house, etc., you can do that and provide those services to people more efficiently within a city. The issue is the overall cost. If you have a lower cost, lower throughput, 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, and disposal of waste.” Chris Smaje
SPREADING MORE THINLY OVER THE COUNTRYSIDE IS GOING TO BE CRUCIAL
Spreading agriculture more thinly can reduce painful economic cycles
”The problem is access to land in a way. It’s the kind of embodiment of capital in land that makes it difficult for people to get secure tenure. So that’s the key thing: either public pressure from below or governmental action to just keep land circulating to secure long-term tenure, because that’s kind of what you need to develop interesting types of local food production. 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; it’s actually, you know, having the time and the security to develop good, small food systems. So, I think there will be some 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 food and localism are going to be and, the need to spread, to distribute, access to land, access to capital, and so on.” Chris Smaje
AGRICHEMICALS ARE KILLING JOBS (NOT ONLY PLANTS AND INSECTS).
Chris argues for circular economies and local livelihood creation to serve people’s needs.
“The whole narrative has been, let’s get people out of agriculture. There’s no real reason, you know? I mean, there’s this real morass of bad economics around this, in terms of food prices, labour prices, energy prices, and sort of land and housing prices. I mean, essentially, what’s happened in the UK, as in many other countries, is that food prices have historically been reduced. But that’s partly because we’ve produced bad global food commodities, using, as you were saying earlier, heavy inputs of fossil fuels, agrochemicals, and so on. Whereas, capital has concentrated in fewer hands. That finds its way into land values or into housing. So, people are paying, more and more money to get a roof over their heads—sort of less and less money for food. And that creates sort of bad cycles of food production and bad economic cycles of concentration of wealth. A lot of the negatives of agriculture are connected with agrochemicals, which are essentially labour substitutes, so lots of fertiliser, lots of pesticides, doing things on a bigger scale, cutting, making fields bigger, getting rid of hedges, getting rid of a greater sort of mosaic local landscape diversity.”
– Chris Smaje
OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED
Koen and Chris also talked about
- Urban isn’t by definition more sustainable and why
- Money is like manure, it does good if it’s thinly spread, if you concentrate it stinks
- Let’s get over our arrogance that we fixed everything
- Why access to land is crucial
LINKS:
- Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future book – Chelsea Green
- The Saying NO debate with George Monbiot and more
- A small farm future book – Chelsea Green
- Local Futures
- Graves, Carwyn Tir the story of the Welsh landscape
- Sitopia book by Carolyn Steel
- Ivan Illich
- Jan Douwe van der Ploeg
LINKED INTERVIEWS:
- Nettie Wiebe – We have become monocultural in our fields and minds
- Henry Dimbleby – From designing the National Food Strategy for England to starting a £50M fund focussed on food transition
- Catherine Tubb, why precision fermentation completely disrupts industrial animal farming by 2030
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.