A Small Farm Future

"This is perhaps the most programmatic of the books. Chris Smaje is a social scientist, but also a farmer. That’s what I really like about it, the deep reading of Marxism and the progressive tradition, the very strong critique of politics and food systems—but then this really lovely, open way of talking about raising chickens and pigs, and his own journey into farming. This, I think, is a key book. It’s a real handbook for the next ten or twenty years. What he understood before many people was all the ways in which food security will be one of the critical thresholds that we are crossing. He’s got a very clear-eyed view of how to prepare for that. “Uncertainty is scary and solidarity is the key to managing fear. We need each other!” He looks at the calorific intake of adults in the UK, where those calories come from, and what that means in terms of land use, land ownership, and food distribution. So it’s a step-by-step critical take on how we produce food, where it’s grown, how it’s sold, how it’s distributed. A really revolutionary programme, really, for the readjustment of the British Isles, breaking down this barrier between the country and the city, which has largely been driven by processes of industrialisation, which has divorced us from our food. Food sovereignty is about involving the people who eat the food in decisions about how it’s produced and distributed and made available. So we’re not all relying on supermarkets, but to a greater extent thinking about where our food comes from and being involved, having some kind of agency. Absolutely. So A Small Farm Future does what we’re doing at Black Mountains College, which is teaching practical skills with an eye on global processes. He talks, for example, about how to extract the model of rural land ownership from a global system of capitalism, debt, and assets. We need it for local purposes. Black Mountains College is a kind of experiment, a model of how to build a life raft, and a place to think about how we might regain some democratic control over the conditions of our own existence, in order to weather the coming storm. That’s why we grow food. That’s why we practice coppicing and sustainable forestry. We are living in an abundant environment here, we can absolutely grow enough food to feed ourselves, we can coppice enough timber to build shelter and to heat our homes. If we’re not using 95% of our land for grazing animals. So it’s both a practical demonstration but also a place to come and critique the structures that are holding us back, and acknowledge that everything is going to change. As the planet warms up, all the things we’ve taken for granted—or many of the things we take for granted, in terms of what food grows, how it’s moved around the world, the water we can access—are going to come under pressure. The final point I want to make is that we don’t necessarily know how this is all going to play out. I certainly don’t have all the answers. But what everybody’s going to have to do is find other people who they can come together with in order to think about and answer those questions. So: community and togetherness is a key part of climate adaptation. That’s true of any kind of social change, but particularly true when resources are going to become more scarce. Uncertainty is scary and solidarity is the key to managing fear. We need each other!"