Why we need a perennial agriculture, and why we may not get it

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Chris Smaje

A couple of posts ago I mentioned the issue of tillage in the context of the permaculture movement. Here I want to discuss another issue at the core of permaculture that troubles me, namely its emphasis on perennial plants.

A key permaculture theme is to observe the natural world and then apply its lessons in conscious human design. Looking at natural plant communities globally it’s striking that almost always they’re dominated by perennial plants, with only a few annuals. Human agriculture, on the other hand, is dominated by annual plants, with only a few perennials. Supposing we could model our agriculture instead on these natural perennial plant communities – the benefits seem numerous. We wouldn’t need to till, to weed, to fertilise, to worry about soil loss or winter leaching and so on and so on. We would put less labour and less energy into our farming, and reap the benefits year after year.

So why don’t we? The literature sometimes presents the issue as a fateful choice made by our farming ancestors – a preference for domesticating annuals that, once made, was as if somebody had switched the points and committed us for ever after to the single track of a high input annual agriculture. There may be something in this. It’s possible to see why the early cultivators might have focused their efforts around annuals and then, with success, had few options but to stick with it. But this view troubles me because it fits within a narrative of modern progress and enlightenment that I frankly don’t believe – the view that our ancestors were less clever and less capable than us in spotting the possibilities for a truly sustainable and sophisticated perennial agriculture. It seems to me that if virtually all human agricultures have inverted the natural order of things by consistently favouring annuals over perennials in the long term, it’s likely due to strong underlying biological causes that are hard for agriculture to overcome, and not just cultural myopia.

J. Philip Grime’s book Plant Strategies, Vegetation Processes and Ecosystem Properties has given me a few inklings about what those causes might be. I can’t hope to convey the richness and complexity of Grime’s analysis here, but his basic point is that three fundamental plant strategies have arisen in response to three types of habitats – the ‘stress-tolerator’ strategy of a low nutrient-low disturbance habitat (think oak tree), the ‘competitor’ strategy of a high nutrient-low disturbance habitat (think nettle), and the ‘ruderal’ strategy of a high nutrient-high disturbance habitat (think chickweed). The fourth logical possibility – low nutrient-high disturbance – basically keeps plants at bay (think wind-blasted scree slope).

Most natural habitats in this schema are low nutrient-low disturbance, and even the ones that aren’t generally have a successional tendency towards it. The plants best fitted to cope with such habitats are perennial stress-tolerators with highly conservative life strategies. Nutrients are scarce, predators are legion, reproduction is risky – so stress-tolerators grow slowly, live long, reproduce cautiously (often clonally) and invest resources in making themselves unpalatable with prickles or poisons. Competitors and – more so – ruderals, on the other hand, prefer to make hay while the sun shines, investing in fast growth and prodigious reproduction at the expense of longevity and unpalatability. But they require habitat disturbance and/or high nutrient input to stave off the longer-term successional advantages of the stress-tolerators.

It’s easy to see where agriculture fits into this picture. Farming peoples want palatable and highly productive plants, and the way they’re most likely to get them is by interfering in succession and replicating ruderal/competitor situations of high disturbance and high nutrition by tilling and fertilising. The result is an agriculture based around prolific, tasty, leafy and/or seedy, mostly ruderal and mostly annual plants.

Grime’s three types are in some sense abstractions, which admit to hybrid strategies in practice. But there are still strong morphological barriers – it’s hard to be stress-tolerant and quick-growing and palatable. Human plant breeding efforts no doubt can and have pushed hard against some of these barriers, but I suspect we’ll struggle to overcome them altogether. For example fruit trees can be quite stress-tolerant, quite productive and certainly palatable – but they’re not very stress-tolerant, and their productivity has probably arisen through co-evolution with fructivorous animals as a reproductive strategy to disperse seeds a long way from the parent plant, which is no doubt why orchards are so disease-prone, and why organic orchards have been described as “the most challenging frontier an organic grower can face” (M. Phillips The Apple Grower). Likewise, most productive herbaceous perennials seem to be pretty short-lived – competitor hybrids, perhaps. Wes Jackson, probably the best known exponent of breeding for a perennial grain agriculture, reckons that it may take at least 50 years to breed a commercially viable perennial grain crop, but he points out that even if we were to develop only one it would pay dividends (Jackson, New Roots For Agriculture, pp.102-8).

I’m sure it would, and I’m sure that professional and amateur breeders should be devoting themselves more fully to the task – especially in places such as Jackson’s native Kansas where the effects of annual tillage agriculture are so manifestly destructive. But I suspect that it will be challenging. Jackson’s oft-quoted remark that “if your life’s work can be completed in your lifetime, then you’re not thinking big enough” maybe hints at his own sense of the difficulties he has embarked upon.

So where does all this lead? For me it suggests that we should support efforts to breed productive perennials – especially seed-based macronutrient-dense perennials – wherever we can, because annual tillage agriculture is pretty destructive. But it also suggests we shouldn’t bank on these efforts succeeding. It suggests that there may be a lot of good reasons for planting gardens packed with fruit and perennial vegetables, but we shouldn’t (yet) delude ourselves that these are ‘permaculture’ gardens unless we can live off them entirely without any surreptitious visits to the bakery or the chip shop (though talking of chips, a long hard look at tuberous perennials may pay dividends). For me personally, I think it means that I want to devote the majority of my farming efforts to figuring out how to grow annual crops as sustainably as I can, for example through agroecological potato growing, rather than going too far down the perennial route. Because much as I’m enjoying this perennial-intensive time of year, with all those lovely creamy spaghettis con asparagi and rhubarb crumbles, sadly it’s the spaghetti and the crumble rather than the asparagus or the rhubarb that are mostly responsible for keeping my hunger at bay. Oh, and maybe the cream as well…which of course brings us back to grass, probably the most successful perennial agriculture we’ve yet devised.

Successful it may be, but sadly an agriculture based around perennial grass isn’t successful enough to feed a planet of seven billion, at least without falling back on other aggressive ruderal strategists – such as Triticum or the notorious Glycine max. And this raises interesting questions about ‘productivity’. Since we devote a huge proportion of our croplands to livestock fodder, could we perhaps afford to push a little less hard at the productivity boundaries likely to trip up perennial grain culture if we adopted a more vegan diet? Maybe, but would it be enough? Everything points to perennial agriculture working best in low population, dispersed, intensive food gathering situations – in other words something barely resembling agriculture at all, so much as the preagricultural situation from which our early farming forebears emerged.

In Permaculture One, the founding document of the permaculture movement, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren wrote that “Permaculture, unlike modern annual crop culture, has the potential for continuous evolution towards a desirable climax state” (p.7). I think that may prove to be pretty optimistic in the face of the biological realities surrounding plant strategies. Any thoughts?

Posted in Growing and Gardening, Permaculture and Forest Gardening | 1 Comment

Of Potatoes and Potato Co-ops

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Chris Smaje

I extolled the virtues of potatoes in a recent post, and in this one I’m returning to the issue with a little more hard data (or hard-ish, at any rate) having just completed an analysis of the energy balance, labour inputs and costs of various scales and methods of potato production. The motive behind it was partly to research the possibility of establishing a local potato growing co-op in Frome where I live – if you’re local and potentially interested in this, please have a look at the full document Notes on Forming a Potato Co-op in Frome, (also posted on this site’s Research page), and get back to me with your comments. If there’s sufficient interest, then this may be something that we could take forward locally.

But I think the analysis may be of wider interest and applicability, so if you’re not local but are interested in sustainability and small-scale farming, I’d still appreciate your comments on my analysis and methodology, or on their implications. The data are in the spreadsheet of underlying data accompanying the document. In particular, if you have any experience or knowledge of potato-growing at any scale from back garden to large-scale arable farming I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on my assumptions and the values that I’ve used in the different models. Are the assumptions sound? Are the values entered in the spreadsheet plausible? If you have any other published data or, even better, unpublished data that you’ve collected in the course of your own potato-growing, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve spent a long time fiddling with the data, agonising over various assumptions, correcting mistakes and so on – I could probably carry on doing so indefinitely, but maybe now is the time to dispatch it into the collective mind of the blogosphere and see what comes back to me.

Just to summarise briefly my findings here, I looked at five different scales/methods of potato production:

  • large-scale mechanised ‘conventional’ growing using synthetic agro-chemicals (to feed 2,000+)
  • largish-scale mechanised agroecological growing using green manures for fertility (to feed 150+)
  • smallish-scale semi-mechanised agroecological growing using green manures  (to feed 15-60)
  • domestic scale non-mechanised agroecological growing using green manures (to feed 1-2)
  • domestic scale non-mechanised ‘organic’ growing using imported manure (to feed 1-2)

The results suggest that broadly speaking unmechanised domestic-scale production is the most energy efficient, but the energy advantage quickly dwindles if you start trucking in manure or driving to allotments. I conclude that there’s nevertheless a good case for establishing local potato co-ops on the basis of semi-mechanised, small-scale agroecology, or even larger scale agroecological growing at a pinch – but you’ll have to read the report to find out why!

More broadly the analysis shows the trade-off between energy input and labour input with the different scales of production. What sort of farming system do we want – an energy-hungry, labour-light one or a labour-hungry, energy-light one? An advantage of small-scale agroecology is that it may work as a compromise between the two extremes. But I’d be interested in your thoughts – so please post them below…

Posted in Energy and Climate Change, Growing and Gardening, Vegetables | Leave a comment

Fertility is in the air, or why no dig systems may not be so great after all

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Chris Smaje

Spring is in the air, the buds are bursting, the birds are at their nests, young lovers are canoodling in sunny parks, and – before I get too carried away – farmers are spraying s**t all over their fields. For indeed it is fertility in the latter sense that is my topic in the present post.

I’ve talked about woodland and grassland in recent posts, so I feel that I should now complete the set by talking about cropland. With cropland, fertility is a key issue, and I’ll come to it in a moment. But first I want to say something about the permaculture movement, which I mentioned in my last post. Permaculture has been increasingly influential on many home gardeners and urban environmental activists. It was certainly what first influenced me to start thinking about food production and environmental issues. But it’s had less influence on commercial, broadscale growing, the game I’m currently playing. I suspect that many permaculturists might argue that this is because broadscale growing is behind the game. Permaculture emphasises no till growing, perennial crops and maximum crop diversity, whereas commercial growing – and commercial farming even more so – remains stuck on the treadmill of tillage, annual crops and monoculture.

That may be a fair criticism, but I believe there are grounds for commercial growers not only to justify doing what they do, but to return fire to the permaculturists, for cherished ideas such as no till and perennial polyculture can easily become ill-considered dogma. I have no wish to set up an argument just for the sake of it. What I hope to have suggested by the end of this post is that there’s merit in both viewpoints, and together they may help us chart a more considered path towards achieving a long-term sustainable agriculture.

So, coming back to fertility, the first point to make is that our crop plants are hungry things and cropland is hugely more fertilised than is generally the case among wild ecosystems. In stable wild ecosystems, most plants are adapted to cope with low nutrient inputs, or else with irregular pulses of nutrient input  (such as when a passing animal urinates in the vicinity) – often being helped in the latter case through association with mycorrhizal fungi (source: J. Philip Grime, Plant Strategies, Vegetation Processes and Ecosystem Properties). In fact, something like half of all the world’s soluble nitrogen results from human agency (source: Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth), which is pretty bad news because this uses a lot of non-renewable energy and causes water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss.

All that is true of organic as well as synthetic fertiliser, although the problems may be less in the organic case. It’s probably easier for conventional farmers to give their crops the correct amount of fertiliser exactly when it’s needed, but on the other hand synthetic fertiliser probably has higher energy costs and is more soluble, and hence potentially more polluting.

I say synthetic fertiliser ‘probably’ has higher energy costs, because in the organic case a lot depends on where the fertility comes from. Suppose that you buy in a load of municipal green waste compost, or cow manure from a conventional farmer, or horse manure from a local stables. You need to factor in the source of the fertility and the costs of getting it to your site: organic manures are bulky, with low nutrient densities, so once you start trucking them around the energy costs quickly mount up. If they’re  from conventional farms then they’re likely to derive ultimately from energy-intensive industrial synthesis, and the same is true if they’re from a stables – or at the very least they’ll derive from a rather questionable land use. I’ll provide some specific figures to back up these claims in a future post (you can also find some on the Research page). It might be argued that the green waste or the animal manures are waste products that might as well be used by organic farmers, but I’m not convinced. If those fertilisers were reused at source it would save drawing down more non-renewable resources in fertiliser manufacture for the next input cycle, and save on transport costs as well. Organic growers buying in fertility in this way are feeding off the bloated body of the fossil fuel economy – it’s a bit like driving to the bottle bank with a few empties in order to ‘save’ energy.

So what are the alternatives? Well, there are a few, but the only one I find really convincing as a general strategy is to grow legume-rich cover crops (‘green manures’), particularly clover – an approach covered in depth in Jenny Hall (now Jenny Griggs) and Iain Tolhurst’s brilliant book Growing Green. The main problem with this from a permaculture perspective is that you can’t easily establish crops into a clover sward; the clover needs to be tilled in first, and according to permaculturists tillage is to be avoided. There are five main reasons why:

  • it uses (fossil) energy
  • it can lead to soil erosion
  • it can damage soil structure
  • it kills soil biota, including mycorrhizae
  • it brings up weed seeds

For these reasons, a lot of domestic-scale gardeners decide to adopt ‘no dig’ methods and import the fertility from offsite, which isn’t difficult on a garden scale. This isn’t really an option for larger-scale growers, because you can never find and transport enough manure and compost, and this draws you into leguminous leys and tillage. But of course if you perform an energy audit, a thousand home gardeners each importing a ton of compost is not energetically better than one farmer importing a thousand tons of it (in fact, it’s almost certainly worse). Furthermore, I think the objections to tillage should probably be rewritten as follows:

  •  it does use energy, but not as much as trucking in manure, especially manure deriving ultimately from synthetic fertiliser.
  • it can lead to soil erosion, but in moist temperate climates with heavy soils such as here in western Britain it doesn’t have to – as is evident from the fact that people have been tilling soils here for many centuries. The same isn’t true of arid places, like much of Australia where permaculture was first formulated and where tillage is much more problematic.
  • it can damage soil structure, but if you’re careful when and how you till much of the damage can be avoided
  • it does kill soil biota, especially mycorrhizae and larger fauna such as earthworms, but if you’re dumping a huge amount of nitrogen and phosphate onto the soil then mycorrhizal action is of limited relevance anyway, the more so because important crop groups such as brassicas and chenopods aren’t mycorrhizal. Tillage replicates early-succession bacterially dominated soils which are what vegetable crops require, so although in an ideal world the destruction of soil biota is best avoided it’s not necessarily that problematic for crop growth.
  • it does bring up weed seeds in my experience, although different methods of tillage do it to different degrees and some authorities even argue that some types of tillage can reduce the soil weed seed bank (source: Davies et al Weed Management For Organic Farmers). Ultimately weeding is a price that growers have to pay for interfering in the ecological succession – and no till growers have to do it too by weeding out incoming seed drop, or dealing with the consequences of weedy manures.

All things considered, I think it’s preferable to grow green manures and till them in rather than adopting no till systems based on imported fertility. I think the permaculture movement and other alternative farming advocates have erred in putting too much emphasis on tillage and too little on input provenance. I don’t doubt that the ‘organic’ gardener who slaps down huge amounts of imported compost can achieve impressive vegetable yields…but then again so can the conventional grower. We need a whole system approach that focuses on achievable sustainable yields.

But green manure systems are still quite crude, amping up the nutrients and potentially resulting in the same problems of over-nitrification that I mentioned earlier. And when all is said and done, it’s best to avoid tillage whenever possible. How wonderful it would be if we could replicate wild ecosystems, with our crop plants adapted to low nutrient input and nutrient pulsing through mycorrhizal associations. That would be true permaculture farming. But let us not run before we can walk. I don’t see the logic of adopting a no till approach on the grounds that it’s more ‘natural’ and then unnaturally importing truckloads of factory-derived compost. Why not first of all focus our efforts on better nutrient cycling, and on optimising organic crop rotations so as to keep tillage to a minimum?

Posted in Energy and Climate Change, Growing and Gardening, Permaculture and Forest Gardening | 11 Comments

Seven Arguments for Grass

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Chris Smaje

I was talking about woodland and grassland in my last but one post before I so rudely interrupted myself to have a rant about supermarkets and farm closures. So let’s get back to the subject of grassland.

Since most of us have had little more experience of grass than as somewhere to play in our parents’ gardens it’s not surprising that we often struggle to think of it as a crop. But grass can be extraordinarily productive (worth thinking about before you go and exercise your dog in some poor soul’s silage field), with the additional benefit of providing a zero till, year round, perennial ground cover of the sort that makes permaculture aficionados drool.

The big problem with grass is that unfortunately it’s inedible, at least to us humans, and the only way we can farm it usefully is by taking advantage of ruminant livestock and their gutfuls of friendly bacteria to turn it into meat, milk, fat, wool and hide, thanks to their 40 million year co-evolutionary dance with the grasses. And the problem with that is that it’s quite an inefficient way of getting nourishment into our bodies, as a million tonnes of vegan promotional literature is only too happy to point out. To make matters worse, ruminants belch out a load of methane which adds to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

In upland areas where it’s not possible to grow anything other than grass there’s a case for farming ruminants. And in lowland areas where the farmer wisely decides to do without factory-made fertility and to create fertility on-farm instead by sowing grass and clover in rotation with arable crops (aka organic farming), there’s also a case for farming ruminants – but in this case the grass has to be temporary and so some of the benefits of perenniality that get permaculturists so excited are lost. Harder to justify on the face of it is keeping lowland farms down to permanent pasture, when the land could be put to more productive uses.

At Vallis Veg, about 25% of our lowland farm is down to permanent pasture – which of course I wouldn’t dream of admitting publicly if I didn’t already have a raft of excuses reasons up my sleeve to justify it. So here they are – please read them and then tell me why I’m wrong.

  1. The greenhouse gas emissions scenarios involving ruminants are complex – ploughing up permanent pasture or transforming it to low productivity uses such as woodland also create emissions, either directly or indirectly in the case of uses that displace agricultural productivity onto ‘ghost acres’ elsewhere. A case can be made for ruminants when they’re incorporated into a productive, mixed agricultural system. The emissions associated with extensive ruminant systems are easily overstated, obscuring more significant sources such as fossil fuel use. Some people, such as Graham Harvey in his book The Carbon Fields, even suggest that ruminants on permanent grass can be highly productive and even carbon negative through the medium of carbon sequestration in grassland soils. I think this takes the argument a step too far. But a good case can nevertheless be made that there is no simple equation of ruminants with environmental ‘bads’.
  2. To farm sustainably probably requires that most fertility inputs are produced on the farm itself. So the farm needs both fertility-making and fertility-taking parts, with grass being an ideal example of the former and ruminants an important low-energy vector between the two (in the absence of synthetic fertiliser, permanent grassland can be as productive as fertilised temporary grass leys).
  3. Pasture is an extensive land use that allows large areas of land to be managed effectively with relatively small inputs of human labour or fossil energy. This contrasts with cultivated ground which is demanding of labour and energy. In the present economic climate, neither land use is financially remunerative so there’s a case for mixing and matching between the two – at Vallis Veg we can’t manage more cultivated land than we already have in cultivation, and no one is queuing up to take on land from us to cultivate. Actually that may not be quite true – I gather there’s a waiting list of around 90 people for allotments in Frome. But suppose we ploughed up all the permanent pasture and rented it out to people wanting allotments. Where would they get the fertility for their veg from? Doubtless by trucking in loads of manure, the fertility in which ultimately derives either from a fertiliser factory or from someone else’s grass, or both. Keep fertility local, I say.
  4. If well-managed, permanent grassland accumulates fertility over time that can if necessary be ‘cashed in’ through more intensive uses at a future date. Keeping an area of ruminant-stocked permanent grassland on the farm can therefore act as a buffer for future agricultural needs.
  5. Related to the preceding point, permanent grassland is a ‘neutral’ form of land use, which is relatively easy to maintain in its existing state – it can easily be turned into more intensive (cropping) or less intensive (woodland) land uses, but each of these are more committing and less reversible forms of land use.
  6. Going back to the permaculture movement, various interpretations of permaculture involve emphasis on perennial over annual crops, maintaining ground cover and valuing traditional local agriculture. Permanent pasture involves a mostly perennial permanent ground cover and is a traditional form of land use in southwest England where Vallis Veg is located, and where grass grows especially well.
  7. Ruminants furnish a variety of useful products, as mentioned above – meat, milk, fat, hides and wool. Non-ruminant derived substitutes for these are often of more exotic and energy-dependent origin.

A slight flaw in my grand design is that currently we don’t actually have any ruminants on our permanent pasture. But hopefully we soon will. At present we don’t live on our site and to be honest running a market garden from afar is hard enough without having to worry about a bunch of sheep and cows as well. But we’re hoping to get planning permission to live on our holding. If we do, we’re aiming to keep ruminants on the grass as well as run the market garden and create good nutrient linkages between the two. If we don’t then we’ll probably mothball the market garden, giving us the time to bring in some ruminants and look after them. Unless of course you can spot any flaws in my reasoning and tell me why we should do something entirely different with the grass…

Posted in Energy and Climate Change, Growing and Gardening | 14 Comments

The Survival of the Richest

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Chris Smaje

Yesterday I went to an equipment sale of an organic grower who’s closing down. I picked up one or two bargains, which was nice – but not nice enough to compensate for the sadness I felt. It wasn’t just the uncomfortable feeling that at the next sale I attend it might very well be me doing the selling, but also the feeling that each of these occasions is one more small example of how badly wrong we’re getting our food system.

If you believe certain ideologues then yesterday’s event was a necessary evil – the tough love of the free market in action, ensuring that only the most innovative and efficient producers get to stay in business, thereby helping to reduce prices and ratchet up productivity. If I’d been around two hundred years ago I might have been one of those ideologues myself, because back then they were probably right. Most of the land was in the hands of the gentry and there was little of the so called ‘market discipline’ around to ensure that prices weren’t inflated to suit the interests of the landholding class. So when the founding fathers of economics such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo formulated their theories of how markets ought to work – with the market’s ‘invisible hand’ finding an equilibrium between competing consumers bidding the price up and competing producers bidding the price down – it must have seemed a revolutionary doctrine for revolutionary times.

Things turn full circle. Nowadays food markets – most markets, actually – are dominated by a few retail behemoths, the new gentry of our age. For although it may be in the interests of society as a whole to have healthy competition between numerous firms, it’s in the interests of any particular firm to eliminate their competitors – which is what the retail giants have done, very ruthlessly.

Well, doesn’t that just go to prove that the big retailers are the best competitors in town? I’m not so sure. Maybe it did once, but in each cycle of market loss and gain financial advantage accumulates in the hands of the victors until sheer market dominance and financial speculation replace resource efficiency and technical innovation as the main route to business development. When I studied economics I was taught that for markets to work efficiently it was necessary to have ‘innumerable’ producers to prevent excessive rent-taking. Currently four companies control 75% of the retail food market in the UK. The Office of Fair Trading – whose job it is to prevent monopolies in order to ensure market discipline – believes that ideally there ought to be another five. Ah well, I suppose nine is a better approximation to ‘innumerable’ than four. But the truth is that the retail giants don’t dominate because they’re more supple and innovative. They dominate because they displace as many costs as possible onto others – taxpayers and farmers, for example. They dominate because they create low-cost food out of ecological rent. And they dominate because they use capital and market control as a weapon.

The way this plays out on farms around the world is this: anyone wishing to invest in the long-term ecological or social wellbeing of their farm or their community loses; anyone seeking to replace cheap but polluting inputs such as fossil fuel with costlier but more sustainable ones such as human labour or site ecological services loses; anyone who refuses to shave margins by investing in larger and newer plant loses. And a lot of people who do none of those things lose too. Our research shows that at Vallis Veg we produce food with much greater energy and carbon efficiency than large-scale farmers and supermarket retailers – but those aren’t the grounds on which market efficiency is judged. And this, ultimately, is why farm concentration continues apace and the farm sales go on.

Defenders of the status quo often point out that the big operators usually started out as small concerns, the implication being that somebody starting a smallholding or a corner shop now can aspire to replicating the same business success if they’re good enough. But when Jack Cohen started the market stall in East London in 1919 that was to become Tesco, I wonder what share of the national food market the four biggest grocery retailers had – I’d be willing to lay a bet that it was a whole lot less than 75%. Anyone starting out in food retail today is looking at a ladder swiftly receding into the sky.

I always find it intriguing to think of parallels between the natural and the social world. Is retail monopoly just like ecological succession? A bare patch of earth is initially colonised by a riotous multitude of pioneer plants, which have evolved good strategies for spotting an opportunity and quickly moving in. But as time goes on they fall by the wayside, replaced by a smaller number of strongly competitive plants such as forest trees, which block the light and strangle out the competition. I can think of two main differences between ecological succession and market succession. First, although the climax ecological community may be dominated by a smaller number of main species there are still innumerable niches for other species to find their place (way more than nine, at any rate) – like bluebells flowering in the spring woods before the big trees have gained their leaves. I like to think of local veg box schemes as the bluebells of the retail world. Unfortunately, the retail giants can do what no forest tree has ever managed and turn themselves into bluebells too. Hey, you want fresh locally grown food delivered to your door? Well, we can provide that too, and provide it cheaper! It’s not so local, it’s not so ecological, it’s not so socially beneficial, but who’s asking?

Second, the ecology of patch dynamics shows that ecological dominance is always provisional. The forest trees may dominate for now but it’s a dangerous world – a storm blows the trees down, or they’re laid low by a fungal disease, or a lumberjack, or an elephant. In nature, there are endless opportunities for renewal. The climax community of the forest has never managed to do what the climax community of the retail world has done, and create governments or Offices of Unfair Trading to police its interests for it and vigilantly crush any signs of retail renewal. One advantage of the ecological community is that it builds in redundancy and resilience, so that when the forest giants fall there are other organisms ready and waiting to take their place. Will anyone be ready if the retail giants fall?

I apologise if this post sounds angry. I do feel angry that good farmers are going to the wall for no good reason. But I don’t know what to do about it other than rant on my blog. If you’ve got some better ideas please post them below!

Posted in Farming Politics, Food Politics & Policy | 5 Comments

Seeing the wood for the trees

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Chris Smaje

I mentioned in my last post the coppice woodland at Vallis Veg – now officially ‘non-coppice woodland’ courtesy of the Rural Payments Agency, as I explained. That seems to lead naturally into a discussion of woodland at our site – or more specifically into the vexed question of the relationship between woodland, grassland and cropland – which I shall probably have to explore in more detail over time.

To start with, let me outline the different land usages on our site. When we bought the land (around 18 acres altogether) it was 100% permanent pasture. We now have about 2 acres of cropland (though some of this is down to temporary grass leys), 5 acres of permanent pasture and 10 acres of woodland. The woodland in turn breaks down into orchards (2 acres); forest garden (1 acre); ash, hornbeam and willow coppice (3 acres); and amenity woodland (4 acres).

I’ll assume that the orchards and forest garden are fairly uncontroversial forms of land use – I’ll probably post more about them in the future. What’s getting increasingly contentious these days (not that you’ll read about it in The Sun – though maybe one day you will…that’ll be when we know we really have blown it ecologically) is the balance between woodland proper, permanent grassland and cropland.

In his excellent book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Simon Fairlie writes “There is a fringe of the green movement which has managed to reduce the complexity of nature to the formula ‘trees good, no trees bad’….If such people get hold of an area of grassland, often the first thing they want to do with it is plant trees all over it. The fact that someone, a long time ago, went to a lot of trouble to get the trees out, and that generations of people have spent energy making sure that trees stayed out, is lost on them” (p.239). In contrast to the products of the grassland a tree trunk, says Fairlie, is “a triumph of inedibility” (p.233).

Incidentally, I keep referring to Fairlie’s book on this blog, calling it ‘excellent’, and then disagreeing with it…and I’m now going to do it again. But it is excellent – the most comprehensive and nuanced case for global small-scale agriculture that I’ve come across.

Fairlie’s point is that woodland is a low value, fairly unproductive land use, whereas good agricultural land is best reserved for higher value agricultural use – particularly as we look forward to a time when we may have to make more effective use of every bit of farmland we have. The tree fetishists, on the other hand, have more nebulous – perhaps even spiritual – ends, like creating nice treescapes for human repose. Such dilettantism cuts little ice with Fairlie – “Woodland today,” he says, “is often planted according to the whims of people whose material livelihoods are more or less unrelated to the rural economy, so if these plantations meet the needs of future generations, it will be more by luck than design” (p.242).

Now, we did plant the amenity woodland at Vallis Veg with some of these vaguer aims in mind. Certainly, despite their inedible trunks, people seem to have a spiritual affinity for trees rarely felt for the annual herbaceous plants that actually feed them, with the possible exception of wheat (we had no trouble recruiting people to help us plant trees at Vallis Veg, whereas volunteers for my onion-weeding events are thinner on the ground). We also planted trees for what seemed at the time more practical objectives – future timber, privacy screening, wind protection, biodiversity, carbon sequestration. We didn’t feel able to manage livestock on the whole 18 acres, so woodland instead of grassland seemed like a good idea.

Reading Fairlie’s analysis has given me pause for thought. Support for it comes from woodland expert Oliver Rackham’s formidable (and excellent) book Woodlands. Rackham points out that woodland plantation on farmed grassland doesn’t usually add much biodiversity, mainly benefitting wildlife that’s already thriving like deer, pheasants, rooks and squirrels (oops…) And you don’t ever get a woodland ground flora if you plant on farmed grassland – you just get tussocky, weedy grass (though actually that is quite good for a lot of wildlife, though hardly very productive agriculturally). Rackham also dismisses carbon sequestration as a worthwhile objective for UK woodland plantation. “Exhorting people to plant trees to sequester carbon dioxide is like telling them to drink more water to hold down rising sea level” (p.439), he says, which is probably a fair point, and not a bad analogy inasmuch as tree-planting and water-drinking are essentially both parts of short-term cycles, whereas the real issue with carbon is our exhumation of long-sequestered reserves laid down in coal measures and oilfields.

So can a case still be made for farmed grassland wood plantations? I think so, if it’s done with proper care. For starters, I’d make the following two points:

  • because energy is currently so cheap, wood can be economically imported from almost anywhere for almost any use, including low grade ones like firewood. In the future, that’s unlikely to be the case. Demand for local firewood, craft wood and other forms of coppiced wood is likely to be high, so there’s a case for establishing local plantations – certainly not on all farmland, but possibly on some farmland. In this respect, I disagree with Fairlie’s view that people who aren’t tied to the current rural economy will make worse decisions when it comes to woodland than those who are. Rackham says “The landscape is full of trees grown for obsolete reasons, and probably always will be” (p.361). There have been times in history when coppice woodland fetched more per acre than arable land – the tree fetishists may yet prove to be right!
  • the main alternative to woodland is usually permanent pasture with grass-fed ruminants, and this is a low productivity system. With a bit of ingenuity, woodland systems may be equally productive. To make ruminant systems more productive would involve ploughing up permanent pasture and adopting grass ley/arable farming – but this has drastically negative environmental consequences, and most of the yield benefit would probably come from a one-time cash-in of the fertility accumulated in the permanent pasture.

The crux comes I think with the ‘ingenuity’ I mention that’s required to make woodland as productive as permanent pasture. Having watched my plantation ecosystem develop for a few years now, and having read Fairlie and Rackham’s thoughts on the matter, I’ve come to think that we probably do need to intervene more actively to balance some of our original goals with a greater emphasis on productivity. Here are my current three favourite ideas:

  • wood pasture: both ruminants and woodland are low productivity systems, so hey why not put them both together and graze ruminants on the grass between the trees? There are lots of practical issues to sort out here – the tendency of the animals to eat the trees rather than the grass (which probably indicates that all pasture ought really to be wood pasture), the competition between trees and grass (what Fairlie calls ‘the struggle between light and shade’) and so on. But there is a long and noble history of wood pasture in the UK, now sadly neglected in the face of intensive modern agriculture. Time perhaps to bring it back?
  • pigs, chickens and people: all edgeland creatures to a greater or lesser extent, happiest neither in deep forest nor treeless plain. So perhaps we can structure our woodland for our mutual benefit – acorns, crab apples and beech mast for the pigs (in addition to some fodder crops, of which more another time); invertebrates and perches for the chickens; birch wine, rowan jelly, acorn bread and hammocks for the people. Sounds idyllic.
  • forest gardening: this is catching on quickly, aided by publications such as Martin Crawford’s recent Creating A Forest Garden – the third and final excellent book that I need to mention in this post. But most forest garden designs are quite intensive, involving lots of fruit and nut harvesting amongst other things. Perhaps there’s also scope for lower input, more foresty forest gardens, involving…what exactly? Ah well, that’s a topic for another time.

In this post I’ve talked mostly about woodland, but really it needs to be looked at in the context of grassland and cropland as well so I’ll try to post some more on that soon. In the mean time, I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on tree plantations, particularly if you’ve created a plantation yourself, so do please post your comments – I know you’re out there reading this, because I have the website stats to prove it!

Posted in Permaculture and Forest Gardening, Woodland | 8 Comments

A Parable of the Talents…

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Chris Smaje

I don’t suppose I have much in common with the Duke of Westminster, Britain’s fourth richest man, but I discovered recently that we share an income source. Both of us get EU handouts courtesy of the Common Agricultural Policy. I think the duke must have the system better sussed than me judging by our pay cheques: a cool £820,000 for the duke, and a not very cool £700.15 for me.

I derived the former figure from an interesting article by George Monbiot, in which he named and shamed some of the major beneficiaries of the CAP – who also happen to be some of the major landowners, since CAP payments are largely tied to size of holding. As Monbiot points out, this negative tax for the rich is not exactly progressive. Unfortunately, the mud sticks to farmers of all kinds – we all seem to suffer from the stereotype of the agricultural subsidy junky in the public imagination. So as someone feeding at a lower trophic level on the EU gravy train, I’d like to share my CAP experience with you as a prelude to asking whether we shouldn’t just get rid of the whole damn thing, as Monbiot suggests. The answer is of course we should – so long as its beneficiaries are prepared to make the sacrifice. And by beneficiaries I don’t mean the Duke of Westminster and his ilk, though I share Monbiot’s distaste. I mean the great British consumer – in other words, you and me.

But first, here’s a brief summary of one small farmer’s CAP experience. When I first bought my 7 hectares of Somerset farmland the single farm payment was just coming in and I was very green in countryside matters, so I let the whole thing slip past me with a certain lofty disdain. I wasn’t earning my living from farming at the time, and it felt good to be above all the money grubbing. Fast forward seven years and I’m a full-time veg grower, annual income circa £5,000, and suddenly the single farm payment doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. So to cut a long story short, we invested no little time and money in buying the SFP entitlements we should have started with, and on 1 December 2010 (I remember the date) found that our bank account was £738.31 to the good.

Fast forward another year, and some weeks after I’d submitted my next claim I discover that the Rural Payments Agency has decided to audit it. A thick wodge of papers is (mis)delivered in the post, including a satellite photo of my holding extensively annotated to indicate where the RPA, in its wisdom, disagrees with my claims. One of the many sticking points was the newly planted coppice woodland which the RPA described as ‘non-coppice woodland’, and therefore a ‘permanently ineligible feature’. I spend most of an afternoon when I should have been actually farming striding around the holding with camera and GPS, trying to fit the fine and immeasurable distinctions of a working smallholding into the RPA’s taxonomic grid. Several letters and telephone calls follow, the result of which is that I concede to the RPA’s view of things in every respect. When, for example, I explain that the ‘non-coppice woodland’ is in fact coppice woodland that is still too young to coppice, the charmingly polite civil servant at the RPA says “Ah well, it’s not coppice woodland then is it, if it hasn’t been coppiced yet?” What chance do I have against the grinding logic of the RPA?

As a quick aside, I have to note that if instead of planting coppice I had simply cut the grass annually on the site where the coppice stands I would have received the subsidy, whereas the fact that I’m in the process of developing it as wood pasture disqualifies it, at least for now (though I was advised to contact the Forestry Commission to see if I was eligible for another subsidy) – which tells you first of all that there’s a disastrous disjunction in rural policy between farming and forestry, and second of all that bureaucracies can’t deal with things that don’t happen on an annual cycle, like developing a sustainable farm ecology for example.

Anyway, enough enough. It’s easy to mock bureaucracy, but those of us who accept money from the public purse can hardly complain when we’re subjected to scrutiny. I’m sure there are many who will sleep easier knowing that as a result of their extensive investigations into my holding the RPA saved the taxpayer £38.16 this year. It probably cost them more to mount the enquiry, but broader principles are at stake.

So much for the details of my own personal CAP odyssey. What are the larger issues? Well, first of all it’s worth bearing in mind that the total income from UK agriculture is about £4.3 billion, and CAP payments total around £3.3 billion – so I imagine that the CAP is keeping many farmers afloat, which doubtless is where the subsidy-junky gibe comes from. But then again, why are farmers so reliant on their subsidies? Could it have anything to do with the fact that we’re remunerated at close to or less than the costs of production? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Tesco, Britain’s largest food retailer, reports operating profits in excess of £3.8 billion, an increase of nearly 50% in four years? And could that have anything to do with the fact that UK consumers now spend less than half the proportion of household income on food than they did fifty years ago?

The issue of farm subsidies is a complex one, but the big food companies and, through them, the consumer benefit both directly and indirectly from them. They benefit indirectly through a subsidy regimen that keeps farmers just about afloat so that the retailer can pay unreasonably low farm gate prices, mark them up (or ‘add value’ to them, in the weasel words of the recent Foresight Report), and then sell them on to consumers at ‘competitive’ prices. It’s neat politics – placating the all powerful figures of the retailer and the voter/consumer, while the farmers get the blame for their subsidy-dependent ways, meanwhile being forced into ever more vicious competition with each other in the global race to the bottom caused by abstract, planet-trashing consumerism.

Talking of planet-trashing, another aspect of the CAP regimen is environmental payments for ‘green’ agricultural practice. On this topic, George Monbiot says, “The rest of us don’t get paid for not mugging old ladies. Why should farmers be paid for not trashing the biosphere? Why should they not be legally bound to protect it, as other businesses are?”

No doubt these are good questions. But if farmers are legally bound to protect the biosphere then by the same token it must surely be reasonable for them to pass on the additional costs of not trashing the biosphere to the people buying their produce. And is that something we, the consumer, are prepared for? Will we cope without our £5 chickens, our £5 potato sacks, our buy-one-get-one-frees? Will we happily buy vegetables from local agroecological growers because we know that they’re growing our food responsibly and well? And before we deride farmers for their subsidy habit, will we first look in the mirror?

Posted in Food Politics & Policy | 3 Comments

A (non-political) blog about vegetable recipes…

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Chris Smaje

One of the reasons I started this blog was that I thought it would be good to have recipes and information for customers available online in an easily archived format. But whenever I sit in front of a nice big blank computer screen the urge to write about the politics of food and farming is overwhelming – hence the underwhelming number of recipes and vegetable posts to date.

Actually, the question of vegetable recipes is quite political too. More than a few ex-customers and potential customers have told us that they’d like to get a box from us, but they can’t really cope with all of the unprocessed veg coming at them in their weekly box. Much could be written about the implications of our fast-paced modern consumerist lifestyle that prevents us from having the time to prepare and cook vegetables, or allows us to ‘cherry-pick’ just a few favourites and forget the virtues of much honest old provender – particularly at this time of year when the boxes are full of parsnips, swede, kale and such like. But hey ho, blah blah, instead of going off on another rant I just want to draw your attention to two excellent sources for box scheme-appropriate recipes, which do a far better job than I could possibly ever do – one is professional cookery writer Laura Washburn’s excellent blog Farm Box Days, in which she handily archives a bunch of her scrumptious recipes that she uses for her own veg box by vegetable type and season. And the other is the Boxing Clever Cookbook by Jacqui Jones and Joan Wilmot – worth getting once again for its delicious, seasonal and box scheme-relevant recipes.

Hey, I actually enjoyed steering clear of politics in this post and focusing on something down to earth and non-contentious. Next week: the Common Agricultural Policy.

Posted in Recipes, Vegetables | 1 Comment

Thoughts from an LDV van

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Chris Smaje

I spent last Wednesday travelling to East Yorkshire and back to collect our brand new delivery van, the old one having spectacularly failed its latest MOT. Well, it’s brand new for us anyway (at 7 years old it’s precisely 22 years younger than the average age of the Vallis Veg vehicle fleet to date). So this post naturally has to be about transport and fuel, a lengthy drive across the heart of England giving me the perfect opportunity to think about these things.

What struck me most as I drove was the depressing ugliness of our country’s transport infrastructure – the motorways, the service stations, the fuel depots, the mouldering railway yards, the factories and the quarries that service it all. And beyond that, the distorting effect that fast, cheap transport has on the economy, particularly the rural economy – the dormitory villages, the fields bled of productivity by pointless international price competition, the overgrown woodlands no longer coppiced because it’s cheaper to import wood from the Baltic.

What also struck me was my own participation in all of this, for was I not myself tearing along said motorways in a 1.5 tonne box of steel I’d bought in service of my supposedly ‘ecological’ farming business? And what exactly did I want instead – an unchanging, chocolate-box Britain in preference to the railway yards, which after all – as Richard Mabey showed in his wonderful book The Unofficial Countryside – have an intricate ecological beauty of their own?

It’s very easy to obsess about greening minor aspects of our lifestyles, and then unthinkingly blow all the accumulated credit in a huge fossil fuel-fest – that flight to New York, or that delivery van. We often justify these decisions on the basis of our ‘needs’, but the justifications always sound a bit hollow to me. How much do we really ‘need’ our delivery van? Well, probably more than anyone needs a flight to New York, but when we started Vallis Veg I fondly imagined that we might be able to make it work as a business by keeping input costs down, particularly polluting input costs relating to internal combustion engines. We owned no vehicles, and no farm machinery, and I had visions of forks and spades, lots of willing volunteers, deliveries by bike and so on. Now we have a van, a 50 hp tractor and a 7 hp tiller – a sad reflection of the fact that in the modern British economy fuel is very, very cheap and human or animal labour is very, very dear. I don’t know whether we really ‘need’ these machines, but I don’t think our business could survive without them (an adult human can sustain a power output of about 0.1 horsepower, so roughly speaking at the touch of a button the tiller gives me the equivalent of 70 agricultural labourers and the tractor 500 of them).

Does it matter? Well, that depends. I don’t think it necessarily matters that I as a purportedly ‘ecological’ grower use machinery. Anti-environmentalists are always quick to smell hypocrisy, but whether we like it or not all of us have to live in the world they’ve created. It’s akin to the argument that nobody who ever shops in a supermarket can criticise them – an argument that would carry more weight if the supermarkets hadn’t systematically eliminated virtually all of the alternatives.

It would matter more if it could be shown that machinery use in small-scale farming was less efficient than in large-scale, conventional farming – in other words, that big machines can get more food on your plate per litre of diesel than small ones. You hear this said quite often in relation to food distribution – that 44 tonne trucks are more fuel efficient than 1.5 tonne vans. This is no doubt true, and if the food system involved nothing more than huge trucks speeding up and down motorways between gigantic farms, then it would be a good argument for large-scale mechanised farming. But since the food system also involves people driving in private cars to out-of-town supermarkets and small vans delivering groceries to shops or door-to-door, and since the alternatives include growing food for local consumption on peri-urban sites like Vallis Veg with no need for any 44 tonne trucks at all, then that particular argument falls by the wayside.

You can ask similar questions about food production on the farm itself. Don’t big modern tractors, with all their GPS-guided gizmos and their capacity to take care of huge tracts of land, outperform somebody like me pootling around with my little 7 hp tiller? I’ve found it remarkably hard to locate any research on this, perhaps because there are now so few small-scale commercial growers in countries like Britain that it doesn’t seem a pertinent question. But inasmuch as I’ve been able to assemble some data and do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, I think the answer is no – there are no returns to scale with increased machinery size. Quite to the contrary, in fact: if energy efficiency is your goal, you’d be better off farming with a fork and spade than a 200hp tractor. You can see some of my research on this here, and I’ll publish some more in a future post.

If you take the view that there will be no long-term problems with energy supply, or with the climate effects of fossil fuel combustion, then the energy inefficiency of modern farming probably won’t alarm you. It’s not quite as cut and dried as that, because farming using fossil energy instead of human energy calls for simplified forms of agriculture, which have other implications. And it also paves the way (quite literally…) for the kind of industrialised landscapes I witnessed as I drove across England last week. Is that problem? Ah well, that’s a topic for another time, I think. And I’ll look some more soon at energy resource futures too.

But there are also complexities that small-scale, fuel-light growers such as me have to confront. When we deliver a local veg box, are we saving our customers a journey in their cars or do they hop aboard anyway to shop for other things? How, precisely, are we managing to grow more food for less energy? Can these growing systems really be generalised beyond the antics of a few mavericks like me to the food system as a whole? And if we don’t like the ‘unofficial’ countryside of a postindustrial Britain, then what exactly do we want? There’s food for a few future posts in all of that too.

Amazing, really what you think about as you drive along a lonely motorway at night…and all this was before I’d left Yorkshire. Anyway, here – should you be interested – is the van in question, in all its glorious redness.

LDV Delivery Van

Will I be able to resist whistling the theme from Postman Pat as I drive around delivering vegetables? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll spray it green and call myself Vegman Chris instead.

Posted in Energy and Climate Change, Vallis Veg News | 2 Comments

Farm Scale Polyculture

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Chris Smaje

As mentioned in the previous post, I attended the excellent Oxford Real Farming Conference  a couple of weeks ago. I gave a short talk at it on farm scale polyculture, and I promised I’d post something here about what ‘polyculture’ is all about. In a nutshell, the idea is that instead of growing single outputs or ‘monocultures’ (a field of genetically uniform wheat, for example), it often makes more sense to grow multiple outputs or ‘polycultures’. In my talk, I tried to address some of the many different dimensions of polyculture and illustrate how we’ve tried to implement them at Vallis Veg, with varying degrees of success.

You can download my talk here  - it’s in the form of a PowerPoint file, so you’ll need PowerPoint to read it. At the conference I simply spoke to the pictures. Here I’ve annotated them very briefly to try to convey what I said, whilst naturally losing much of the detail.

Posted in Growing and Gardening, Permaculture and Forest Gardening | Comments Off