Peak Everything (12 page)

Victory Gardens were a project for all age groups and involved local shows and fairs where prizes were given for the best of everything, as was the case for these school gardeners in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1944.

It could be objected that Cuba's experience holds few lessons for our own nation, since Cuba has a very different government and climate.

Let us, then, consider an indigenous historical example. During both World Wars, Americans planted Victory Gardens. During both periods, gardening became a sort of spontaneous popular movement, which (at least during World War II) the USDA initially tried to suppress, believing that it would compromise the industrialization of agriculture. It wasn't until Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden on the White House lawn that the agriculture secretary relented; his agency then began to promote Victory Gardens and take credit for them. At the height of the movement, Victory Gardens were producing roughly 40 percent of America's vegetables, an extraordinary achievement in so short a time.
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By 1945, Victory Gardens were being actively promoted by the US Department of Agriculture. In the early days of World War II, the USDA tried to discourage Victory Gardens out of concern that they would inhibit the development of industrial agriculture.

In addition to these historical precedents, we have new techniques developed with the coming agricultural crisis in mind; two of the most significant are Permaculture and Biointensive farming (there are others — such as efforts by Wes Jackson of The Land Institute to breed perennial grain crops — but limitations of time and space require me to pick and choose).

Permaculture was developed in the late 1970s by Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in anticipation of exactly the problem we see unfolding before us. Holmgren defines Permaculture as “consciously designed landscapes that mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fiber, and energy for provision of local needs.”
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Common Permaculture strategies include mulching, rainwater capture using earthworks such as swales, composting, and the harmonious integration of aquaculture, horticulture, and small-scale animal operations. A typical Permaculture farm may produce a small cash crop but it concentrates largely on self-sufficiency and soil building. Significantly, Permaculture has played an important role in Cuba's adaptation to a low-energy food regime.

Biointensive farming has been developed primarily by Californian John Jeavons, author of
How to Grow More Vegetables.
Like Permaculture, “Grow Biointensive” is a product of research begun in the 1970s. Biointensive farming has been defined as

Like Holmgren and Mollison, Jeavons has worked for the past three decades in anticipation of the need to de-industrialize food production due to accumulating environmental damage and fossil fuel depletion. Currently, Biointensive farming is being taught extensively in Africa and South America as a sustainable alternative to globalized monocropping. The term “biointensive” suggests that what we are discussing here is not a de-intensification of food production, but rather the development of production along entirely different lines. While both Permaculture and Biointensive have shown themselves capable of dramatically improving yields-per-acre, their developers clearly understand that even these methods will eventually fail us unless we also limit demand for food by gradually and humanely limiting the size of the human population.

In short, it is possible in principle for industrial nations like the US to make the transition to smaller-scale, non-petroleum food production, given certain conditions. There are both precedents and models.

However, all of them imply more farmers. Here's the catch — and here's where the ancillary benefits kick in.

One way or another, re-ruralization will be the dominant social trend of the 21
^st
century. Thirty or forty years from now — again, one way or another — we will see a more historically normal ratio of rural to urban population, with the majority once again living in small, farming communities, despite current trends in the other direction. More food will be produced in cities than is the case today, but cities will be smaller. Millions more people than today will be in the countryside growing food.

They won't be doing so the way farmers do it today, and perhaps not the way farmers did it in 1900.

Indeed, we need perhaps to redefine the term
farmer.
We have come to think of a farmer as someone with 500 acres and a big tractor and other expensive machinery. But this is not what farmers looked like a hundred years ago, and it's not an accurate picture of most current farmers in less-industrialized countries. Nor does it coincide with what will be needed in the coming decades. We should perhaps start thinking of a farmer as someone with 3 to 50 acres, who uses mostly hand labor and twice a year borrows a small tractor which she or he fuels with ethanol or biodiesel produced on-site.

How many more farmers are we talking about? Currently the US has three or four million of them, depending on how we define the term.

Let's again consider Cuba's experience: in its transition away from fossil-fueled agriculture, that nation found that it required 15 to 25 percent of its population to become involved in food production. In America in 1900, nearly 40 percent of the population farmed; the current proportion is close to one percent.

Do the math for yourself. Extrapolated to this country's future requirements, this implies the need for a minimum of 40 to 50 million additional farmers as oil and gas availability declines.

How soon will the need arise? Assuming that the peak of global oil production occurs within the next five years, and that North American natural gas is already in decline, we are looking at a transition that must occur over the next 20 to 30 years, and that must begin approximately now.

Fortunately there are some hopeful trends to point to. The stereotypical American farmer is a middle-aged, Euro-American male, but the millions of new farmers in our future will have to include a broad mix of people, reflecting America's increasing diversity. Already the fastest growth in farm operators in America is among female full-time farmers, as well as Hispanic, Asian, and Native American farm operators.

Another positive trend worth noting: in the Northeast US, where the soil is acidic and giant agribusiness has not established as much
of a foothold as elsewhere, the number of small farms is increasing. Young adults — not in the millions, but at least in the hundreds — are aspiring to become Permaculture or organic or Biointensive farmers. Farmers markets and community-supported agriculture farms (CSAs) are established or springing up throughout the region. This is also somewhat the case on the Pacific coast, although much less so in the Midwest and South.

What will it take to make these tentative trends the predominant ones? Among other things we will need good, helpful policies. The USDA will need to cease supporting and encouraging industrial monocropping for export, and begin supporting smaller farms, rewarding those that make the effort to reduce inputs and to grow for local consumption. In the absence of USDA policy along these lines, we need to pursue state, county, and municipal efforts to support small farms in various ways, through favorable zoning, by purchasing local food for school lunches, and so on.

We will also require land reform. Those millions of new farmers will need access to the soil, and there must be some means of making land available for this purpose. Here we might take inspiration from Indian Line Farm, a model for farmland preservation and conservation, which pioneered the use of conservation easements and community land trusts to make farmland available to working farmers.
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Since so few people currently know much about farming, education will be essential. Universities and community colleges have both the opportunity and responsibility to quickly develop programs in small-scale ecological farming methods — programs that also include training in other skills that farmers will need, such as marketing and formulating business plans.

Since few if any farms are financially successful the first year or even the second or third, loans and grants will also be necessary to help farmers get started.

These new farmers will need higher, stabilized food prices. But high food prices, and likely food scarcities, will pose enormous problems for consumers. As difficult as it may be to imagine now, food rationing may be required at some point in the next two or
three decades. That quota system needs to be organized in such a way as to make sure everyone has the bare essentials, and to support the people at the base of the food system — the farmers.

Finally, we need a revitalization of farming communities and farming culture. A century ago, even in the absence of the air and auto transport systems we now take for granted, small towns across this land strove to provide their citizens with lectures, concerts, libraries, and yearly chautauquas. Over the past decades these same towns have seen their best and brightest young people flee first to distant colleges and then to the cities. The folks left behind have done their best to maintain a cultural environment, but in all too many cases that now consists of a movie theater and a couple of video rental stores. Farming communities must be interesting, attractive places if we expect people to inhabit them and for children to want to stay there.

We have been trained to admire the benefits of intensification and industrialization. But, as I've already indicated, we have paid an enormous price for these benefits — a price that includes alienation from nature, loss of community and tradition, and the acceptance of the anonymity and loss of autonomy implied by mass society. In essence, this tradeoff has its origins in the beginnings of urbanization and agriculture.

Could we regain much of what we have lost? Yes, perhaps by going back, at least in large part, to horticulture. Recall that the shift from horticulture to agriculture was, as best we can tell, a fateful turning point in cultural history. It represented the beginning of full-time division of labor, hierarchy, and patriarchy.

Biointensive farming and Permaculture are primarily horticultural rather than agricultural systems. These new, intelligent forms of horticulture could, then, offer an alternative to a new feudalism with a new peasantry. In addition, they emphasize biodiversity, averting many of the environmental impacts of field cropping. They use various strategies to make hand labor as efficient as possible, minimizing toil and drudgery. And they typically slash water requirements for crops grown in arid regions.

We have gotten used to a situation where most farmers rely on non-farm income. As of 2002 only a bit less than 60 percent of farm operators reported that their primary work is on the farm. Only nine percent of primary operators on farms with one operator, and ten percent on farms with multiple operators, reported all of their income as coming from the farm.

The bad side of this is that it's hard to make a living farming these days. The good side is that we don't have to think of farming as an exclusive occupation. As people return to small communities and to farming, they could bring other interests with them. Rather than a new peasantry that spends all of its time in drudgery, we could look forward to a new population of producers who maintain interests in the arts and sciences, in history, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology — in short, the whole range of pursuits than make modern urban life interesting and worthwhile.