this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Solarpunk Farming
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That was really good, even if I'm missing some context. We on the left honestly have a blind spot for what global food production actually entails. I live on a small, previously abandoned farm that I've been slowly fixing up, getting it to at least do something, and that pretty tiny exposure to trying to make food beyond the scale of a garden has rocked my goddamn fucking world as to the politics of food.
You often see leftists very confident that going vegan is the main (or even only?) thing that we need to do to fix our food supply, and then on top of that, maybe we add some organic and permaculture or something, maybe with a dash of local first. Unfortunately, food is way more complicated than that, and we have basically no idea how to feed the entire Earth's population without heavy use of fossil fuels as both inputs and fuel, even if we all go vegan, no matter how much I'd personally love a local-first permaculture world where all our lawns are tomatoes or whatever.
If you're interested in this topic, Sarah Taber also writes about it a lot. She shares this essay's view on the dangers of food nostalgia, though she tends to focus on the American obsession with the family farm, which is actually an insanely inefficient and stupid way to farm (I can now personally attest to this), from both a modern and historical perspective.
Yeah, some interesting thoughts.
Going mostly vegan would definilty open a lot of land for other farm uses, both grazing land that could be converted to tree orchards and conventional agricultural fields currently used to grow maize silage, but I agree that it would not solve the fundamental issue of temporary food insecurity in many places.
The thing with animal agriculture is that it's efficient in terms of capitalism. We are really good at growing corn and cutting hay with virtually no human labor, and then we can very cruelly stick all the animals in one giant torture lot to feed them. The perishable product comes out year round, so you can invest in an efficient and constant supply chain without a complex warehousing situation, and corn/hay/silage/whatever is easy to store.
I don't see any way to a sustainable, ecologically sound, less cruel food system within capitalism. It's going to involve a lot more human labor. Even if we want to eat mostly grass (all grains are grass) like the cows do, and, as mentioned in the OP, like our peasant ancestors did, which wasn't a particularly nutritious way of life, we still have to deal with the fundamentally unsustainable way we grow grains today: Spraying pesticides (including herbicides and insecticides) to literally kill everything but the special pesticide-resistant corn, and dumping petrochemicals that are nutritious to the corn itself but devastates the topsoil, and so on. Our farmlands today are functionally productive deserts.
In the US, we are functionally incapable of growing anything labor-intensive without migrant labor. Even where I live, in Vermont, with the most hippie dippy organic farms per capita going on, all our beloved orchards that aren't pick-your-own rely on seasonal Jamaican migrants, whose special visa status also includes artificially set wages by the federal government, otherwise it just wouldn't work. All our economically sustainable dairy operations rely on illegal migrant labor, because there is no dairy visa since it's not seasonal. Everyone I know who wants to farm has a job doing some sort of farm regulation thing instead, like organic certification, and they farm on the side, often barely breaking even -- all this while hunger, especially child hunger, is rapidly increasing in our area.
Basically, the entire thing is fucked.