Collapse

Collapse

“I won’t have to get people to believe it when physics and geology start driving the process.”

Peter Kilde

When electricity stops being something that can be produced cheaply and crude oil is scarce and expensive to extract, some currently habitable areas of our country may no longer be livable and will have to be abandoned. Remote, arid areas with no ready source of water or food currently have diverted and pumped water and or imported food. This would stop with the advent of peak oil. Those populations would have to move to other areas of the country, further stressing the areas that they move to. Our methods of farming would radically have to change. As the desert grow regions stopped producing food, there would be shortages.

Famine is part of the human cycle of history.

All societies eventually collapse. Ours will at some point. No one wants to be around when that takes place. It’s not a fun process. In Russia the collapse of the Soviet system happened with great speed. Six months before the official end of the  Soviet Communist government, people thought that the suggestion of collapse was crazy.

After the old system of government collapsed, the population of Russia dropped due to death and emigration away from the country. Mostly, though, the population went down due to death. Crime was a major factor in this. Economic collapse leads to major crime increases. People become more desperate. People become more vicious. People forget that economics is based on something that isn’t real.

However, the population in Russia was very resilient. Through a massive garden system outside of Moscow in the suburbs, most of the food was still able to be produced for that city. The people ate mostly storage crops such as cabbage or roots, but they were fed. Other cities also had similar systems. No one was evicted from their homes because no one owned the housing. It was all owned by the State. People were still able to travel because there was already an effective public transit system in place. The government was able to keep this system running. People were able to buy what they needed because there was an intricate Black Market system in place due to the former repression of the Soviet system.

From the outside came foreign capital to restart the Russian industrial system. However, that kind of recovery is possible only if help arrives from the outside. On a global scale, there is no outside. Unless alien tourist industry comes to Earth and sets up some stellar hotels and employs lots of hairless simian life forms in their service sector, we’re screwed.

We came very close to a total global collapse of economy when the U.S. economy vortexed downward. If another nation, such as China, were to spiral down and take the U.S. down with it, global collapse may yet happen.

Soon.

It is unlikely that alien tourists would want to visit a burned out shell of a planet. So, we need to be more careful with our world to keep up its tourist appeal for that out side capital to be there when we need it.

Currently in industrialized society, there is a misallocation of resources and time to maintain our way of life. This life, both private and political, is getting more and more complex. Societies collapse when the complexity of their systems becomes too much of a burden on the available resources in their environment. When the resources become unavailable

the systems disintegrate

quickly.

What will motivate a behavior change to modify our priorities and our way of being on the planet? Hopefully not global economic collapse. Hopefully, people can get over their political and religiously self important selves. Humans, especially industrialized humans, have been in control of the uphill process so far using their ingenuity, technology and greed. But, soon the earth and its processes are going to take over the steering for the downhill slide using physics, chemistry and geology. And the earth doesn’t care if you believe what is happening or not. If you want it to happen or not.

Climate change data is public. But if you would like to have data on how much oil there is available to extract, you can’t. That’s secret. Why is that?

Using one resource to get at another is only as effective as what you get out of it. Ethanol, the savior of the corn midwest, is a 1.3 to 1 ratio of energy in to energy out, a 1 to 1 ratio at best. Tar sands are also very close to even to extract the oil found in them. Hydrogen is a 3 to 1 energy in to energy out process. When it takes a barrel of oil to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground the companies pack up and go home.

There are no vast oil wells in the midwest. But, an ethanol plant ensures that there will be economy. The parts and machinery of the production plant have to be built by a company, creating jobs. The ethanol plant itself creates jobs. The corn farmers get to sell their corn to the ethanol plant. The truckers that haul everything get jobs. Making ethanol burns up as much or a little more energy than the ethanol itself will put out. Then, the ethanol gets used to power vehicles at a lesser rate of BTU return than gasoline. Ethanol is cleaner to burn than gasoline. But, we are burning fossil fuels to make this plant based fuel to burn it in cars. Fossil fuels are burned to make the fertilizers and pesticides that are applied to the corn. Fossil fuels are used in the machinery to harvest and truck the corn. Eventually, when the oil is scarce enough and costly enough, the ethanol plant will close. All the jobs will go away. That’s the temporary benefit of “creating jobs” instead of actually benefiting our society. But, someone along the way made a profit.

And it’s all

“green”.

Good Ol' Days of Subsistence and Possible Changed Habits

Good Ol’ Days

We can choose to not be so complicated all the time. Anthropologists are currently studying simpler times before the industrial revolution to gain insight on how to solve current problems. Simple and complex are relative terms. Simple could be defined in this context as people powered. Complex can be defined as machines or solid state technology. 

To be clear, peoples lives have never been simple. Going back to a simpler time in memory is a way to escape the seemingly harsher reality of the present and replace it with a romanticized past. Simpler times in this context are past times in which less was used to achieve the same results, usually with a trade off of labor. Technology, especially mechanization, replaced physical labor. But, that labor achieved more for the individual directly. People worked for themselves usually with their families together. Today, people leave their families to go work for someone else. To sell products to someone else. To make money for someone else. Today, people in other countries don’t farm their own cultural lands. They grow cash crops on the same land but they don’t own it anymore. They work for the new owners of the land. In this country, more and more family farms are being bought by corporations and the family stays on as employees to run the farm for someone else. They then get cash to buy what they used to make and produce for themselves.

Subsistence

“I know that I could take my chain saw, truck and dog, go until the truck dies and be OK.”

Crystal Halvorson

We can become dependent on our technology very quickly. Technology makes life easier in the short run. If you had to haul your own water to do your dishes and to wash with, would you use less water than you do now? If you put up all the food you need for a winter, would it be rewarding to you? Would you appreciate the land around your home more than you do now?

We don’t have to take advantage of everything we have invented. We can live a life of less convenience and more work. Life would simply be harder. But also more aware. More connected.

People who have lived a subsistence life have a different view of the resources around them. They see themselves as responsible for how they live physically. When they grow their own food, hunt their own food and put up enough food to last them through a winter, they are working directly for themselves. They have most certainly earned what they have.

People who work a job to get everything that they have, have also earned those things. The difference is that there is an enormous and hidden infrastructure system supporting them in this effort. And, this infrastructure is causing immense destruction on the planet.

Either we find a system that offers less convenience and more subsistence for our industrialized populations to earn what they have or

we shall be forced to do so

in a greater haste than anyone would like.

The Possibility of Changed Habits

In Juneau Alaska, a town in a remote area of the state, all the electricity comes from a Hydro-electric power source. An avalanche took out the single cable running power to the town. They had no power for four months due to the difficulty in getting crews to the area to fix the cable. In the mean time, back up diesel generators were used to provide functioning power. The cost of power to the residents of Juneau became almost five times more expensive. It jumped from .11 cents per kilowatt hour up to .54 cents per kilowatt hour. The residents of the town cut their energy use by 40% in two weeks. They took out one light bulb in each room of government buildings. They shut down their saunas, their pools and stopped watering their golf course.

They changed their habits.

Not only because electricity became more expensive, but because there simply wasn’t enough electricity to operate all the things they would have liked to have. There was enough electricity to run critical town and home systems. The cost of this electricity to run those systems became very expensive. This is a foreshadowing of what we as a society could face in the not too distant future.

We would be able to have what we need

not what we want.

Other Ways of Business and Coop Caution

Other Ways of Doing Business

As individuals, as communities and as a society we need to remove ourselves from a dependent way of being - cash - and move toward relying on ourselves. We can barter with our friends and neighbors for what we need with what they need. This will strengthen our immediate communities. This will create an independent community and not one dominated by a cash economy.  By creating a barter economy a community will be able to connect with itself and become more sustainable. The individuals will become more sustainable.

Co-ops: A Cautionary Tale

We need a structure to hang our concerns on. We need a structure that can be an alternative to the corporate way in the world. The co-op structure serves this purpose well.

Beginning as a way for people to get what they needed when power structures failed to provide those things, co-ops have served many needs for many people around the world. Food co-ops were begun in the late 1800s to get poor, impoverished workers access to quality food at prices they could afford. When the company stores that the workers were forced to use would not provide quality food at a reasonable price, the workers banded together to begin buying clubs and co-ops.

This is much the same way food co-ops have started in modern times. Residents of a deprived neighborhood get together and begin a buying club or a food co-op. This is a result of people wanting greater control of their food source, something corporations provide none of. A corporation controls; it does not allow the patron to control. This is the origin of the phrase born of the modern food co-op movement - “People before profits.” Sadly, this phrase has in recent times fallen from use. “People before profits” cannot be reconciled with “profit as a focus”. 

Since the mid 1990s, food co-ops have begun a process of corporatization. Corporations cannot take over co-ops by direct acquisition, but they can control co-ops through indirect acquisition via policy, culture and contract.

Once co-ops have adopted internal structures that mimic corporate structure, those co-ops' responses become easier to predict. Once co-ops have signed exclusive contracts with corporate distributors co-ops become easier to pull into the corporate way of being in the world. Co-ops become dependent on corporations and the infrastructure they provide. Co-ops become easier to control and manipulate for corporate gain and profit. If competition cannot be eliminated it needs to be controlled for the gain of the controller.

When co-ops were more autonomous they were difficult to control and their responses to situations were difficult to predict. When the internal structures of co-ops were unique and supporting of their own individual and localized needs, co-ops were a much stronger force of resilience and a galvanizing force in the communities they sprang from. Sadly, the business of selling food in our culture has been slowly absorbed by corporate production, buying and distribution power. This makes it exceedingly difficult for small or moderate sized food co-ops to compete financially with corporate owned food chains. They cannot compete with the low prices corporate stores offer unless they buy their food from corporate owned and controlled sources in large quantities.

One answer co-ops have gravitated toward is joining together to strengthen their buying power. A seemingly easy solution was to form an umbrella organization to facilitate co-ops banding together and to dictate responses to changing situations within the co-op food industry.

This structure mimics a corporate one. Through the umbrella structure, the co-ops are advised how to structure themselves based on corporate ways of analysis. This includes internal policy and governance. By structuring themselves internally as corporations, the culture of the staff also changes. The day to day becomes more rote and less creative. Less input is sought by management and more is dictated.

The co-ops have also entered into binding contracts with corporate food distributors exclusively. This gives the co-ops better pricing for staple goods. But, this arrangement puts independent distributors out of the market helping the corporate system gain hegemony. Co-ops seldom support local vendors for purely political reasons anymore. Co-ops seldom do anything for purely political reasons anymore. Supporting local entities and boycotting corporate entities because it’s the right thing to do has given way to the financial benefits gained by supporting local or corporate entities.

Now If one co-op falls, they all can go down

in a very predictable way.

Do away with corporatization of the co-op. Return to core co-op structures, co-op ideals and a unique co-op way of being in the world. Corporatizing co-ops leads to focus on profits and not ideals. It’s the ideals that set co-ops apart.

An umbrella is a tool. To use it for fear of getting wet is understandable. But if there are obstacles in the way blocking the umbrella’s passage and the person under the umbrella lets the umbrella dictate that they cannot walk in the rain, this is counterintuitive. To know when to fold up the umbrella so that the person may pass by the obstacles in a more sure footed way is wise. The key is not to fear the rain. Then, the umbrella remains a tool controlled by the person, and not the other way around.

It is up to the members of co-ops to be very involved with what is being done internally at the co-op. It is up to the members to be the experts and not abdicate those responsibilities solely to a few people. It takes more work to involve the membership in more decisions and it takes a membership that wants to get involved. It means sharing deciding power. It means working together instead of top down decision making. It means making the co-op a true part of the community. It means making the co-op “ours” instead of “mine”, throughout. The “my” language is corporate. The “our” language is co-op.

This is the substance of the difference.

Corporations have long been viewed as the models of success because our culture views profit as success. The death, ruined lives, destruction and environmental damage done by corporations to achieve profit is never added into this model. Co-ops can change this way of doing business if they themselves don’t get trapped within it. By going down the path of corporatization, co-ops have squandered their most precious resources - their connections to local producers, their staff, their own members and ultimately their own communities.

However, co-ops that focus entirely on ideals are seldom financially sound. If their doors close there is no more vehicle for the ideals they purport. A balance of the business of selling food and the philosophy of people before profits is the core of what can make a co-op thrive. But leaning more toward ideals is what sets co-ops apart from corporations. It is a balance that is not symmetrical.

Profit

is a heavy weight to counter

indeed.

Education

Education

A human being is like crops - create the environment of healthy soil, water, air, food, and the crop will do its own work. Figure out what the crop needs, then give it that. When a person’s needs are met then the person can grow, will grow, to their fullest potential. It’s our birthright to be able to grow to our fullest potential as human beings. Anyone who stops us from doing so has a reason.

And that reason

revolves around control.

In our society right now we need children that function on a high level. With our current system what we get is a low level of functioning. We get an emotionally stunted development. We get adults with the emotional processing ability of children. We get adults who are easy to control.

If we can see the world through the eyes of a child, make decisions based on a child’s needs, then we have taken a major step in being sustainable as a culture and in letting go of the things that ultimately keep us imprisoned. Imprisoned in a world of fear, estrangement, abuse, violence, deterioration of our planet’s environment, all for the sake of people we will never see or know in our lives. Those who profit. Those who exploit. Those who take more than they give back. Or simply take and never give anything back at all.

Sustainability is about empowerment and reaching the potential we have as an individuals. Our culture needs sustainable human beings. Our culture needs humans who are able to reach their highest potential.

Our current public education system in the U.S. is not capable of meeting these needs. The stated purpose of this eduction system was to create a “docile” work force. To adapt people to this society. Docile means easily managed or handled. Or for practical purposes, afraid. Education in this culture is designed to minimize human potential. Just like a mono-crop of corn is designed to have uniformity and no variance in gene type, our system for educating our children is designed to produce the same person over and over again. Someone who responds to orders, responds to bells, conforms to the given societal standards, follows the rules, knows their place and most importantly

does not question authority.

People’s own thwarted potential is what scares them. They then impart this notion onto the next generation, willingly.

What does it take for you to be a sustainable person?

We, as inhabitants of this culture need to ask ourselves many questions. Some of which get to the very core of sustainability as an idea. How does this culture affect us as individuals? As people? As humans? How does this culture affect other cultures and their inhabitants? How does this culture affect the natural (real) world around us?

Is our way, our personal way, sustainable? Are we as individuals healthy in mind and body? Is our spiritual way able to live in harmony with the Earth? With others? Are we destructive in our actions and beliefs? Do our beliefs and actions destroy other human’s lives? Do they destroy other living things? Do they destroy the world? Do we take and not give back? Are we disconnected from ourselves? Our true selves? Other humans? The natural (real) world? The Earth? Or, do we prefer to luxuriate in the detritus of our technology? Our distractions? Relate to other humans through a haze of Victorian era morals and etiquette?

By observing the child and meeting the needs of the child we begin to correct the future. By putting the child first and designing environments that meet the needs of the child, we are allowing for the future to have sustainable humans.

There are other models of education. There are those that have the revolutionary and empowering notion that the child’s needs come first. If we’re going to have a revolutionary education, then we are going to have a revolutionary society. The problem for those in power with this notion is, there can no longer be a mono-crop system in place. Within an education system where children are empowered, there must be diversity. Diversity makes people difficult to manage and

difficult to control.

Business As Usual

Business as Usual

Once humans started to farm on a mass scale this allowed for cities to be created. Cities are a major cause of the problems we as a species face on this planet. How can this be reconciled? Can cities change as well as farms? Can farms become less massive? Can cities produce their own food? Can city dwellers get more in touch with the real world and less with the concrete and manufactured world? Can they deal with not getting what they want when they want it? Can they learn to work for their food by helping to produce it, rather than working for money to buy it?

Maybe.

Certainly if forced. That has been shown. Another thing that has been shown: Once city dwellers start producing their own food, they don’t necessarily want to go back to their old way of being. So then why be that way at all? Why not fundamentally change the way our society is structured? A very few people would lose their status and wealth while a great many will be fed in perpetuity. This kind of trade off is worth the effort.

Most importantly however, there would be an awareness. An awareness that all people are connected to the soil, the water, the air and the planet as a whole. We have to adopt new ways of being, especially those who live in cities and dense communities. There needs to be an awareness of presence. An awareness of actions and interrelations.

An acknowledgment that there is no entitlement to the land and its resources.

These are things, sadly, that are not taught within industrial society. These things are actually reviled in favor of conformity and a continuation of what is often called “our way of life”. What is currently happening at the end of the first decade of the twenty first century is

business as usual.

One side of the political spectrum says, "I do not want to change my ways." The other says, "We are going to find alternate ways of maintaining our ways.". Neither is willing to truly change this society’s way of being within the world.

To maintain the kind of society we have is a great burden and responsibility. It is our obligation to minimize and or eliminate this weight upon the Earth. The question here is: "Where to begin?"

Trade Offs, Parts, Clear Cuts etc.

Clear Cuts, Strip Mining, Nuclear Power

Planting some pine trees won’t bring back a lush indigenous forest. Mining uranium to use it to boil water to turn a steam turbine and then deal with waste that will persist in geological time, longer than anyone can truly comprehend, is not sustainable. But yet these are the very things that are being touted to “save” our way of life. So we can power our homes. So we can run our machines. So we can play distracting games. So we can watch distracting entertainment. So we can type, as I type now, on a computer made in another country with components that are extremely toxic to make. So I can drive to work in a car that is more polluting to make than to drive. So that the infrastructure of our way of life, be it conventional, alternative, even rural farming, can be maintained.

Can it?

Parts

The parts that make up so called Green Technologies must come from somewhere. If the parts aren’t “Green” then how can the whole be called “Green”? The Lithium to make the batteries for Hybrid cars is not reusable the way lead is in traditional car batteries. It’s a one way street. If the majority of the worlds Lithium is located on land surrounded by indigenous populations, what will happen? Will the environment these populations depend on be destroyed and the populations displaced all for the sake of building something “Green”? What is green? It’s a color and simultaneously a marketing term to make people feel good about contributing to business as usual. Once Industrial society figures out how to be healthy it can figure out the conundrum of being

 “Green”.

Trade Offs

We can power our homes with solar cells. Solar cells which are extremely toxic and energy intensive to make. And, ultimately, will produce less energy in their life time use than it took to make them. But the trade off is that someone somewhere will not have to rely on a grid generated power source using coal, oil, radiation or natural gas. That investment is made at the manufacturing site so it does not have to be made in a private home or a local power plant. The energy is still used up. The pollution is still generated. It just all happens somewhere else. The Earth still bears the brunt.

We can figure out better trade offs. Working to improve the manufacturing process to be less energy sucking and less polluting is one way. Working on using other forms of electrical generating devices such as wind turbines, private or otherwise, is another. Or, the best possible option, changing our habits and using much less electricity. Or, using none at all. Or, somewhere in between. Either way, habits need to be changed.

Fuel will cost too much to import.

Food will become more important than fuel.

Fair Trade, Local, Organic

Fair Trade - Equitable Trade

Fair is a four letter word. It often leads to those who have, being able to get more than those who don’t, just because it’s fair. Everyone gets the same. So, if those who have more participate, they get the same as those who have less. Those who have more don’t need any more at all. Those who have less need to get more so there is a balanced amount of resource distribution. This will allow for everyone having enough. That’s equitable. But, those who have more are the first to scream that it is unfair to give their share to someone who has less than them. In this case, fairness maintains the current power structure and distributes more resources to those who have the power.

Fair Trade is a first step. It allows those who are involved with the production of goods to get a premium price, but those producers don’t have direct negotiating rights to determine that price. The premiums that their goods do get, are determined by the market. A program called Good Trade provides direct negotiating rights to the growers and producers involved. Those growers and producers determine how much the purchaser will pay for their goods and not the other way around. The growers and producers can then make sure they get what they need to continue producing, surviving and thriving. The growers and producers then start to control the market and not the other way around. That is equitable. That is true Fair Trade, when everyone gets what they need.

Local

Local is being spun as a marketing gimmick. Walmart advertised “Local” on its web sites. For Walmart, produce from anywhere in the U.S. is considered local. The U.S. is a very large land mass. What local means to many people is not food being trucked 1500 or more miles. Local is basically meaningless unless defined. We need to define local. Give it some guts. Give it standards. This definition cannot come from a corporate source making profit from what is local. It must come from the people directly involved in the locale. It’s the people who need to insist that before anything be sold to them as “Local”, this thing honor a set of standards that the people have designed themselves.

Organic

“Organic” used to be a philosophy and a movement. Now, philosophy has been thrown out the window and the focus is on law and financial economy. Multinational corporations have become or bought organic food producers, manufacturers, distributors and sellers. Profit takes precedence over the health of the planet and the needs of the people.

Corporations as organic food producers is probably the single most destructive thing that happened to the organic movement. An entity that focuses on profit cannot participate in a movement that focuses on the benefit of the planet and the creatures living on it. Just because the law says something is organic, does not mean it is "Organic".

Community, Land-Base, Sustainable Agriculture

Another late posting and I apologize for it. Here are a few tidbits of light thoughts before bed time.

Community

Community (My definition, combining the meaning and spirit of official ones.) -  A group of living organisms and the environment around them, interacting in a way that is mutually supporting and connects them all.

Land-base

Land-base - An area of land and water that supports a community, or several communities, of living organisms.

Sustainable Agriculture

Most people can understand the words of sustainable agriculture, but do they really understand what the term means?

How is sustainable defined in this case? If you can get it and keep getting it from your land-base, then it’s sustainable. If not, or if it runs out because you have depleted it or made it unusable, then it is not sustainable. This is how all creatures exist on the planet

except people.

Farming

Farming

One example of sustainable farming is an Indigenous tradition from the Oneida. It is called The Three sisters. The Three Sisters is an integrated agriculture system of growing corn, beans and squash together in a mutually supporting way. Industrial culture calls this method, intertillage.

Corn, beans and squash are grown together in the same mound. The corn provides a tall structure for the beans to grow on, the beans return and fix nitrogen into the soil for the corn, squash spreads out between the mounds to provide ground cover and limit weeds. These are complementary foods, meaning that when they are eaten together, or when two are eaten together, they work in unison to provide complete protein, minerals, amino acids and vitamins. The crop yield is more than enough to sustain large populations of humans. 

The traditional Oneida farm is called Tsyunhehkwa (Joon hey-kwa), meaning literally, “It provides life for us”.

Today, the Oneida food system has three parts - 

The Production Division - Shakoh^ta?slu.ni’he?, meaning, “He prepares the fields for them”.

The Processing division - Tsi?tkutekhuwa.y^he’, meaning, “Where they put the food away”.

And, the Distribution Division - Lutunhetsla?nikulale?, meaning, “They look after all living things”.

They look after all living things.

How many retail food outlets take this up as their mission? How about food distributors or wholesalers? What a different world it would be if this was the view of all entities associated with food production. 

CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farms are a bridge between the sustainable and unsustainable. People in many cities seek out CSA farms. Most CSA farms need little marketing effort, as they find there is no lack of people wanting shares. But how do city customers view the  CSA entity as a food source? Are they simply buying a box of groceries, or are they seeing this as an alternative to a faulty system of food distribution? Or, somewhere in between?

Many CSA farms require that their members work on the farm itself. These workers help the farmers offset the enormous amounts of labor that it takes to run the farm and get the crops to harvest. The CSAs that have a working membership also have the highest retention rate of members. People get connected to the farm if they work there. They see where their food comes from first hand. They help grow and mature it. They help harvest and prepare it. They also help deliver it. They participate directly in their food source. They see the effort and love it takes to produce food for themselves and for other people.

In industrial society, and especially in cities, there is a profound disconnect from the source of people’s food. Food is purchased in stores and how it got to the store is almost never witnessed. Possibly, the delivery trucks are seen, and that is all. But, by working the land to produce their own food, people who live in cities regain the connections they have lost. They become part of the real world again.

Many CSA farms are attempting to be more sustainable. In the context of CSA farms, sustainability is choosing what works in their area. Besides trying to live in equilibrium with the land - taking from the land as much as the farm gives back to the land - farmers are using techniques adapted to their climates. Hoop houses, green houses, cover crops and crop rotation can help. But, in cold climates the green houses have to be heated above 32 degrees in order to produce food in the winter. To do this by burning fuel is counterproductive, expensive and not sustainable. Using passive heating techniques to offset or eliminate the use of fuel is a much more sound approach.

If done correctly, farming puts back into the soil potentially everything it takes. However, this is a very difficult goal to achieve. It requires careful planning and knowledge from the farmer. It requires a society willing to support the farmer’s efforts and to do without when conditions dictate it. Labor, knowledge, commitment, community and a love of the earth are what is needed for a more sustainable farming future.

Farming is very difficult. In today’s society many farmers purchase some form of labor saving input for their farm, like sprays, compost or machinery. The machines have to be built, parts have to be made, fuel to manufacture the machines has to be drilled for, transported, refined, transported again and finally used. Sprays and compost have to be manufactured, trucked to the stores so they can be bought, and so on.

A family farm or independent farm has a very difficult time making a living solely from farming. The farmers often have jobs outside of the farm in order to maintain a steady and consistent cash flow. Some farmers cannot make ends meet and quit, moving back into the cities. Those who continue cite the amount of labor and how hard it is to produce food for others. But they also cite how enjoyable farming is. They believe in the system of food production they are participating in. They are passionate. They are in touch with the Earth.

However, as farms get larger, the work load increases to the point where a farmer must use more machinery to farm, thus making the farm less and less sustainable. A large, fully mechanized corporate run farm cannot be sustained without vast amounts of infrastructure behind it, nor can a small family farm using machinery and goods that are factory made. The factories that manufacture all these things do not put back.

One model for an alternate farming structure is the Old Order Amish style of farming. In this style of farming, few machines are used. Transportation is not motorized. Agriculture is done by human and animal power. Fertilizing is done by composting and using the manure produced by animals. Yields are substantial enough to produce surplus. This surplus is sometimes sold or traded using a communally owned truck. Community structure is mutually supporting. Homes and out buildings are built by hand and by members of the community.

Resources are shared

not sold.

The future of local agriculture, and quite possibly all food distribution, is that farmers must ultimately unify in small, localized organizations to pool resources and to strengthen themselves as individual farmers. This can be extended to the surrounding populations who could pool with the farmers, sharing their labor and their resources in a mutual relationship and creating an interdependent community.

There was a time in human history when the entire surrounding population would come out and harvest the crops that they all planted together on land that they all shared. They all lived and worked in accordance with the seasons. Everyone grew their own food together for the whole community. The community worked together. Today, the seasons are heralded by retail merchandise changes. Only a few people are farmers. Most everyone else buys their food from a store. 

In this country all people can be fed with organic based agriculture, especially if people change their eating habits and expectations. But this takes labor and knowledge not machines, chemicals and manipulated genes. To do this there need to be more farmers, not necessarily more land under tillage. The corporate and mono-crop operations need to be broken up into smaller farms owned by more farmers. Less plants need to be grown to feed animals for slaughter or to provide ingredients for processed foods or to manufacture fuel. More plants need to be grown to be fed directly to people. The land needs to grow different plants and not all the same plant. There needs to be diversity. There needs to be companion growing, intertillage and the mindset of The Three Sisters. There needs to be a greater attachment of those who live in cities to their food supply.

There needs to be a greater awareness of the rhythms of the Earth.

There need to be more gardeners.

There need to be more gardens

everywhere.

“If we’re not sustainable or living a sustainable life the Earth will figure it out, and that will be OK.”

Erin Altemus