In the 1970s, environmentalists and politicians in the imperial core
quivered in their seats over the prospect of a population
explosion.
Malthusian prophecies of total collapse and Thanos esque proposals of
racial extermination pervaded political thought.
For many, it seemed the end of the world was
at our doorstep.
Our cities are going to be choked with people, they're
going to be choked with traffic, they're going to be
choked with crime.
And one of the main worries was that food production
wouldn't be able to support the billions of mouths that
would be born in the coming decade.
More famines and shortages.
But then the Green Revolution happened and everything was supposedly
better.
Labor saving technology and fossil fuel laden chemicals pulled the
world back from the precipice of famine and death.
At least that's the dominant narrative that has been pushed
since the 1970s.
Today though, we're going to deconstruct this story about industrial
farming and answer a nagging question.
Can small scale regenerative farming feed the world?
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The so-called Green Revolution was a temporary patch on a
much larger food system crisis.
If anything, the industrial farming explosion in the 1970s, which
implemented new labor saving technologies like combine harvesters, high yield
varieties like dwarf wheat, and the consolidation of farmland to
increase global food production seems to have done more harm
than good.
Part of this has to do with the fact that
the Green Revolution substituted the cost of Labor with that
of fossil fuels.
Instead of endless hours on the farm, landholders just used
fossil fuels to power their harvesters, tillers, and develop synthetic
fertilizers.
For an aging farming population, this was great news.
You could get the same yields you were getting before
and only have to work two weeks in the spring
and two in the fall.
For the soil, the atmosphere and and the insect and
bird populations, however, this new industrial agriculture spelled disaster.
As a result of the tireless tilling practices of industrial
agriculture, which churns up and kills the fragile microbiome and
organic matter of the topsoil, the health of conventionally tilled
soil is now diminishing at more than twice the rate
that it's regenerate, a crisis which leading soil scientist Doctor
Ratan Lal describes in one word bleak.
Our new fossil fuel agriculture in bodied in the miles
of corn and soybean monocultures in the heartland of the
United States and now being pushed on the imperial periphery
by Agri business giants like Bayer, Monsanto and Syngenta, has
also meant significant greenhouse gas emissions to the tune of
24% of our total global yearly emissions.
And on top of that, industrial agriculture is killing waves
of insects and birds and crushing the bodies of farm
workers and prisoners forced to work grueling harvest hours for
little or no pay.
We stomach the mounting toll of industrial agriculture because it's
supposedly feeding the world.
Yet most of the mono cropped farms in the imperial
core don't directly produce food going into our mouths.
Most often the vast fields of corn get churned into
animal feed, fuel, or various sugars and additives that do
eventually reach our mouths, but in an extremely roundabout way.
And the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa, also
known as Agra, an initiative backed by Bill Gates and
the Rockefeller Foundation, reveals industrial farming's failure to feed the
world.
In the countries where Agra operates, there's been a 30%
increase in the number of people who are suffering hunger.
And the agricultural productivity is kind of the same as
it was before Agra began.
Indeed, large scale industrialized agricultural endeavors only account for 50%
of global food production, and it's the farms that are
producing the other 50% that we must look towards for
an escape route out of our current unsustainable capitalist farming
system.
Before the combine harvester and the synthetic fertilizer, the world
was feeding itself through the labor of millions of small
scale agricultural endeavors across the globe.
Today, that's still the case.
Small scale farms produce 51% of the world's food.
So the question of whether small scale farming can feed
the world is a short answer, yes, but of of
course it's a little more complicated than that.
Regardless of whether it's regenerative or industrial, we are currently
producing more food than we need, which means that hunger
and food insecurity are less a question of production than
one of distribution, access, and infrastructure, all of which are
exacerbated by systems of oppression like racism, classism, imperialism, and
capitalist exploitation.
In the United States, for example, 40% of food is
wasted.
Yet there are thousands of marginalized communities suffering from food
apartheid and access to nutritious and tasty food.
All this is to say that as we transition away
from large scale fossil fuel centric agriculture to small scale
agroecological pursuits, we must also transform our food systems outside
of the farm.
But before we get to the possible approaches to that
gargantuan problem, we first need to understand why small scale
regenerative farming can not only heal our relationship with the
land and reverse the effects of fossil capitalism, but also
provide a breeding ground for the masses to topple our
global capitalist system.
And the outskirts of Albany, NY lies a farm drawing
on African indigenous roots and knowledge.
Farmers there have turned a patch of land from barren
soil into a thriving ecosystem in a matter of years.
They're growing food that's going to communities of color that
lack access to tasty and nutritious food because racial capitalism
deemed their area not fit for profit and ultimately fresh
farmed produce.
And they're growing this food while sequestering carbon into the
soil.
Instead of big tractors, there are hands in the dirt.
Instead of miles of monoculture, there are acres of polyculture.
Instead of industrial agriculture, there is Afro, indigenous permaculture.
This farm is called sulfire farm and it's just one
of the countless examples of why small scale farming is
essential in the imperial core and periphery alike.
To be clear, when I say small scale farm, I
mean agricultural practices based on traditional knowledge that seeks to
grow a diverse range of plants for local consumption while
healing the soil in the process.
This can take a number of forms from backyard intensive
farming operations, to permaculture informed food forests, to indigenous LED
hemp based operations.
All of these are devoid of tilling chemicals and highly
mechanized processes that divorce farmers from the land and ultimately
lead to a world where food comes from the grocery
store and not the ground.
In terms of the environment of regenerative, small scale farm
can be a mighty tool in the work to forge
resilience and tackle the climate crisis.
If done correctly, a small scale regenerative farm can capture
carbon and its soils to the tune of one to
two metric tons per hectare, promote a biodiverse landscape through
crop diversification and perennial trees and flowers, which also happens
to build resilience in the face of extreme weather.
And it can do all of that while using significantly
fewer fossil fuels and toxic chemicals, all while achieving similar
yields.
Alongside the clear environmental necessity for small scale farming, these
farms have the potential to be a Nexus for change.
Farms are what keep us alive and tie us together.
Which means that they can be a space for affinity
groups and organizations to gather and strategize to strengthen bonds.
And Sul Fire Farms does exactly that.
They OfferUp their farmland to leftist organizers and communities in
need of a space to build power.
But farmers themselves also have power in numbers and can
be agents of change.
Just look towards India, where the might of farmers was
on display for months, bringing key entrance rows to Delhi
to a standstill in protest of a proposed neoliberal farm
bill.
At the end of the day, the small scale farm
can instigate big change.
But that change can only happen when thousands, if not
millions, turn back to the soil and put in the
hard work that regenerative agriculture requires to heal the land.
You give everything to the land and then you yourself
physically wear out, mentally you wear down, and spiritually you
start to question.
That's a quote from a small scale farmer in the
US who reveals the stark reality of developing viable farming
alternatives under capitalism.
Farming is hard work, there are no two ways about
it.
Indeed, the rate of suicide amongst farmers, whether in the
US or India, is extremely high compared to other occupations.
A 2016 study of alternative farms in Ohio reveals what
most small scale farmers already know.
The labor requirements of small scale agriculture are on average
15% higher than that of industrial agriculture.
And in our current global capitalist system, where fossil fuels
have artificially driven the price of food to the floor,
that extra labor often goes unrecognized in the form of
65 hour work weeks or hordes of unpaid interns.
This shows us that a regenerative farming revolution must be
accompanied by a full scale societal one as well.
Fortunately, the two can be and indeed are interconnected in
the imperial periphery.
Anti capitalist, indigenous LED farmers movements like La Via Campesina
are already showing the world that another more nurturing reality
can exist under the umbrella of Via Campesina farmers.
Protests like that in India and Indonesia are exposing the
untenable reality of life as a peasant farmer under capitalism.
But if we look outside the bounds of capitalism, the
small scale farm can act as an anchor to a
thriving communist, anarchist, eco socialist or even solar punk society.
Where in the farm and the work of healing the
soil and nourishing the community aren't dumped onto one person,
but shared throughout the community via farming co-ops like in
Cuba or community work shares.
The small scale farm is bursting with radical change for
our environments, our bodies, our relationships and even our politics.
But that change can't happen from behind our screens.
We must go out into the land, find those toiling
away in the soil and help them build a revolutionary
tomorrow.
If you're curious about what a farm of the future
looks like, or what small scale farms now are paving
the way towards the future, then you're in luck.
I wrote a small section about future agroecological farms and
the tools we can use to get there, but I
cut it out of this video because it felt like
a tangent and I wanted to appease the YouTube algorithm.
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