It's difficult to pinpoint any thing or things that got us started on this venture. Watching the world that our children were entering as young adults was certainly part of it, including the terror of having a son serving in Iraq
My questions to myself became, how do I go forward? How do I even get up every day, having become aware of the mess we’re facing, the overwhelming inertia hurtling us into it, and our powerlessness to stop it? How to conduct one’s life with such knowledge? How to live with my own complicity in our predicament?
Some days—surrounded by believers in the invincibility and rightness of our culture, in the myth of progress, the myth of American exceptionalism, the myth that technology and American ingenuity will find a way—I felt as if I was losing my mind. I couldn’t sleep, thinking of my kids’ future. I was filled with regret that I hadn’t prepared them for the world they will inherit. I had done nothing. I had raised them as if this life will go on forever. Instead of driving them to soccer tournaments, I should have been teaching them to grow and forage food. To make and fix things. To adapt to the unexpected, to live with physical hardship. To keep warm without fossil fuel. To clothe themselves without Walmart. To live lightly upon this earth.
Well, my husband and I reasoned, at least we could try to find a sane way forward for ourselves, in case our family wanted, or some day needed, to follow. Somewhere in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we came up with the beginnings of a plan.
It is now six years later. We have shed as much debt as we could. We have built a small cordwood house on a piece of land in a small agrarian community. We have some dairy goats, a small herd of meat and fiber sheep, a flock of chickens, a large vegetable garden, and a small woodlot. We are gradually establishing perennial plantings of fruits, nuts, and other edibles. We have left our salaried jobs behind: this is now everything we have. For us, it felt like the only possible response to powerlessness, to try to build up knowledge and resources and resilience. This is our present and as much future as we can create.
So, you’re homesteading
“Oh, you’re homesteading!” many have said. “I always wanted to do that. Just couldn’t figure out how to make it work.” I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Of course they can’t figure out how to make homesteading work. Neither can we; neither can anyone. Homesteading is a uniquely American myth.
There is an image of the go-it-alone, self-sufficient homesteader that has become firmly ingrained in the American psyche, even though the history of homesteading was quite different. The Homesteading Act of 1862 permitted citizens to take possession of a 160-acre parcel of land through the act of building a dwelling on it and farming it. The western frontier needed to be settled, and the Homesteading Act, along with a steady stream of immigrants, provided our government with a way to populate it. For the most part, these early homesteaders traveled westward in groups and depended on each other for their lives. They were quick to build towns and schools and develop community life.
Today, however, homesteading implies forsaking community and modern society, living off the grid, “getting out of the rat race,” and being “self-sufficient.” But where does one acquire the means to buy the land and materials to erect the not-insignificant infrastructure that self-sufficiency requires? Whence came those solar panels and batteries? I recently went to a workshop on “how to set up a diversified self-sufficient homestead,” in which a perfectly nice woman enthused about her wonderful “self-sufficient” homesteading life with her children—which seemed largely funded by her husband, who commuted every day to a full-time, off-farm career. Many members of the audience, who had come to find out how to achieve the mystical but next-to-impossible dream of self-sufficiency, got up and left, disappointed. I recently read about another family on a “self-sufficient” homestead in the Canadian wilderness—a family who has supplies, fuel, and building materials flown in by plane once a month. In addition, they depend on satellite Internet and electronic finance to operate an income-producing business.
The reality is that most “self-sufficient” homesteads today could not exist without the financial, technological, and industrial infrastructure of modern society. The ideal of homesteading as a state of self-sufficiency is a myth that sets would-be homesteaders up for failure. We need each other in order to survive.
So, you’re going to be a farmer
I think about all of the information I have read for beginning farmers. Visions of business plans, machinery and equipment lists, financing plans, and a profit strategy sufficient to repay the required debt run through my head, and chills go up and down my spine. I have run a small business before. I have drawn up business and marketing plans and made pitches to bankers and investors; I have said, “How high?” whenever my banker said jump. Debt slavery is not a way forward.
Part of the problem is that so often those of us looking to break out of what columnist Chris Hedges so aptly calls “the savagery of unfettered capitalism”[2] get co-opted by it. I am always amazed at the number of Maine
Farmers—even small farmers—are taught to farm with expensive and energy-thirsty equipment, additives, and purchased feeds. The problem with using expensive equipment and inputs is that it forces your primary goal, indeed your only goal, to become a profit margin. Many farming families find it necessary for one member to keep an off-farm job for the required constant injection of cash. We’ve lost the knowledge and ability to farm without commercially produced inputs. Archeological evidence indicates that humans have been keeping domesticated chickens since 5400 B.C.E., yet industrially produced livestock feeds have been in widespread use only for the last 100 or so years. I ought to be able to figure out how to feed my chickens without Blue Seal.
The viability of agricultural production, as taught and promulgated by the powers that be, is also a myth, and even more, is part of what got us into this mess. It is not a way forward.
Searching for models
I find myself looking for models in history. I learned that “food production has always been primarily polycultural, from primitive hunting and gathering to current third world house gardens and managed agroforests. For 98.5 % of farming history, humans have produced food from integrated polycultures.”[3] In fact, contrary to the popular notion that our society represents the pinnacle of advanced civilization, there have been many stable, successful societies in the past that did not depend upon unlimited growth and consumption—upon infinite mining of the resources of a finite planet. Such societies had networks of reciprocal obligations that did not depend on money.
In Hugh Brody’s study of Irish rural life, Inishkillane, “some form of mutual aid 'compounded of claims and counter-claims between farm households has prevailed in virtually every society where small farming has been the basic activity. . . .' There is little evidence, Brody says, that the households involved in a mutual-aid relationship ever bothered to keep an account of each other's obligations. "It seems that the details were vague and the fact of the relationship more important than the memory for particular exchanges that occurred in it. What a household knew was the neighbours they could look to for help, and to whom they would not refuse to give help if asked themselves."
He likens the relationship to that of savers to their bank. "The giver, by giving, guaranteed that he would be the receiver in the future. In that way, the giving of surplus to friends and neighbours is not very far from the giving of surplus to the cashier in a bank. The quality of integrated society, like the legal rules of banking, guaranteed that the gift would not be forgotten and a future claim ignored."[4]
I also found contemporary models for a sustainable way forward, for instance, in the crofting reform movement in Scotland
“Crofting supports more people per unit of land than any other 'non-urban' land use in Scotland
Australian farmers and researchers Larry and Barbara Geno provide another model in perennial polyculture farming, which they have found to result in higher and more stable yields per unit of land. “Besides the benefit of yield and income, polyculture can be seen to produce social benefits to both the land-holder and the surrounding community. Overall, the very practice of polyculture can be seen to benefit people rather than input manufacturers. Bradfield (1986) noted that updating traditional multiple cropping practices (as opposed to promoting monocultures) offers the potential of scale specific technologies that favour the small farmer.”[7]
The promise of smallholding
The act of smallholding is the act of being part of a community. Self-sufficiency is neither possible nor desirable for the smallholder. As an integral part of a community, a smallholder has community obligations—obligations that don’t fit into a business plan. By the same token, a smallholder relies upon various kinds of assistance from fellow smallholders and community members—upon a network of reciprocal community obligations.
A smallholding is a resilient, diversified ecosystem of perennial polycultures, which may include vegetables, fruits, and nuts, intercropped annuals, livestock, and annual crops that provide food, fiber, and other necessities to sustain people, livestock, land, and wildlife in a healthful, low-input, low-cost, and relatively low-risk manner. The smallholder’s agricultural practices do not degrade the soil and water and do not reduce biodiversity. A smallholding produces its own fertilizer in the form of compost and manure, creating a closed loop requiring minimal inputs. The primary goals of a smallholding are to sustain life for its inhabitants and surrounding community. This often involves a combination of subsistence farming with sharing, barter, and sales of surplus. Smallholdings depend upon a local market or distribution network. Smallholders often develop a variety of small income or barter streams that complement the work of smallholding.
Low-input polyculture, married with local employment—self or otherwise— in activities that serve or supply the community, along with local markets, could provide the foundation for the kind of diversified rural economy that would foster the reinvigoration of sustainable rural communities. It could provide a way forward in uncertain times. We are at a historical moment when the establishment of sustainable ways of life is crucial. Communities of tightly networked smallholders, shopkeepers, and people who ply their trades and crafts locally provide the potential for a sustainable future, perhaps even for any future.
We are closer to being able to realize this vision in Maine
Local interdependence
The way to build sustainable resilience is not through individual self-sufficiency, but through community self-sufficiency. As Carol Deppe observes in The Resilient Gardner: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, not everyone needs to or can do everything. We don’t need independence; we need “enough knowledge and skill to hold up our end of honorable interdependence.” [8]
Community-supported agriculture has an important role to play in this process, and Maine
Richard Douthwaite, author of Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World, observes that one of the most serious failings of modern industrial society is that the definition of efficiency—and success—is entirely commercial and excludes all other objectives. He argues that a community enterprise has a “moral obligation” to consider the community’s interest, and points out that the industrial system as we know it could not exist “had businesses not been subsidised on a massive scale by taxpayers, the environment and society.”[9]
Douthwaite suggests that we need “to devise a new type of communally-owned commercial organisation which will have some of the features of a craft guild. . . . Its main objective will be to serve the people of the area in which it is located rather than to make profits for owners or investors. As a result, it will be free to seek donations to balance its books and call for volunteers to help and advise its paid staff.” He observes that in preindustrial rural communities, people survived through a combination of subsistence farming, household exchanges, community labor, and occasional employment. “A mixture of activities was the norm then and it is likely to become so again in a post industrial period. Most people will do many more things for themselves and their families . . . supplemented by work for their neighbours—either directly or through a community co-op company “[10]
How do we facilitate the development of local cultures and economies that can support us in what promises to be a rocky future? We have lost the habit of depending on one another, and the knowledge of how such interdependencies function and benefit us. Our monetary economy places no value on such behavior. We need a system that provides the structure in which we can safely relearn how to support each other, as well as the incentive to do it—a system that values the kind of helping, mentoring, and nurturing services that the market economy dismisses. A growing number of communities are developing local time banks to provide such a structure:
“For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you. It's that simple. Yet it also has profound effects. It turns strangers into an extended family. We’re going to need to depend on our neighbors as extended family to live well in a world with shrinking natural resources. “[11]
Wendell Berry wrote, “The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. . . . The only true and effective 'operator's manual for spaceship earth' is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.”[12]
Why smallholding?None of the goals I have as a smallholder would be acceptable in a farm business plan. I want to make a small living from a small piece of land, while doing everything possible to provide for my family’s most fundamental needs. I want to try to nurture this small part of the biosphere and improve the health of the land. I want to try to be a good neighbor and community member, to help our community become resilient and capable of meeting its members’ needs. I want our smallholding to help build a community in which it is possible to live and make a living, a community in which we protect and nurture our natural resources instead of allowing corporations to consume them, in which goods and services to meet our needs can be produced, exchanged, and distributed, a community in which a core economy of obligation and reciprocity sustains its members.
Small holding. Small: just a little corner of the world, as much as we can take care of very well. Holding: not owning, not restraining, but holding, the way you hold someone you love. To care for just a little, for just a while, for safekeeping. In hopes that something of value will be left for our children and future generations.
Small holding. Small: just a little corner of the world, as much as we can take care of very well. Holding: not owning, not restraining, but holding, the way you hold someone you love. To care for just a little, for just a while, for safekeeping. In hopes that something of value will be left for our children and future generations.
[1] Let me add that by no means do the people I have mentioned agree with one another, nor do I agree with all of them, or even all of what any one of them says. This is just a sampling of some of the perspectives that helped open my eyes.
[2] Chris Hedges, “The Origins of America’s Intellectual Vacuum,” Truthdig. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_origin_of_americas_intellectual_vacuum_20101115/
[3] Larry Geno and Dr. Barbara Geno, Polyculture Production: Principles, Benefits and Risks of Multiple Cropping Land Management Systems for Australia Australia
[4] Hugh Brody, Inishkillane; Change and Decline in the West of Ireland (Penguin 1974), in Richard Douthwaite, Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World, (Cloughjordan , Ireland
[5] Fiona Mackenzie, Where do you belong to?': Land, identity, and community in the Isle of Harris,Outer Hebrides , Scotland
[6] Mackenzie, p 10.
[7] Geno and Geno, pp 27, 31
[8] Carol Deppe, The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self Reliance in Uncertain Times (White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2010). p 9.
[9] Richard Douthwaite, Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World, (Cloughjordan , Ireland
[10] Douthwaite, ch 7, p3.
[11] “Time Banks for Sustainability,” www.timebanks.org
[12] Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture,” in Douthewaite, ch 7, p 4.
No comments:
Post a Comment