Last week, we presented at the Kew Garden’s Growing Veg, Communities and Sustainability event. Fran, one of our wonderful Sustainable Farming Assistants studiously took notes on some of the other great talks on the day. Here’s some thoughts on Colin Trudge’s talk:
Colin is a well known writer and campaigner, most recently in the press for launching the Oxford Real Farming Conference alongside the established Oxford Farming Conference earlier this year. An engaging speaker, Colin put forward his ethos of ‘Enlightened Agriculture.’ This contextualized all the later presentations and certainly Sutton Community Farm is a good example of many of his principles put into practice.
Colin borrows the term ‘convivial society’ from Ivan Illich to stand as the ultimate aim of society – a peaceful, happy society existing as part of a secure biosphere – but to get to this, we must get agriculture right first as all other societal and ecological ‘goods’ or ‘bads’ stem from agricultural practice. Colin believes that is entirely achievable for enough good food to be provided for everyone in the world, without wrecking that world. This requires rethinking all our first principles and our ideas of political, economic and social structures, our moral imperatives and our understanding and use of science. As well as a systemic restructuring of society, Colin urges us to take matters into our own hands to these ends – a strong theme of the day as the later presentations illustrated.
Giving examples from government policy in the UK, Colin explained his opposition to an approach to agriculture that saw it as merely (or even) a contributor to GDP and required it to constantly compete in the world market. He criticized the constant message of economic growth as desirable and disputed the claim that a growth in food production was vital to feed the growing world population: not only is the global demographic curve leveling off and the population size stabilizing but we already produce enough food. That one billion people are currently malnourished is due to a combination of maldistribution, using land to produce biofuels and animal fodder and wastage.
‘Enlightened Agriculture’ or ‘Real Farming’ instead focuses on three main principles:
- Produce enough – but not more than enough
- Sustainability of production (“keep the soil in good heart;”)
- Resilience: the ability to change as conditions (climate) change.
These principles emulate nature in their requirement of diversity, integration and low input of resources. Their practical application leads to smaller farms run as an ecosystem – poly-cultural, integrated and organic – rather than large, mono-cultural and intensive. Farms should be complex and skills intensive, not simple with minimal labour requirements. With the current impetus of modern agriculture to maximise profits and minimize costs (e.g. labour) complex agriculture is impossible, the danger of spreading infectious diseases is increased, unemployment is increased and land and soil fertility damaged or destroyed.
Though it may be argued that this type of farming could not feed the world, in fact 50% of all food currently produced globally is from small or medium sized farms, 20% is home-produced or gathered and only 30% comes from large-scale, mono-cultural farms. Where small farms are not producing to their full potential, for example in India, this is not because they need to upsize become more high-tech but because of a lack of infrastructure in some regions, a lack of suitable roads limiting access to markets, for example.
Regarding horticultural food production, Colin noted that it is often dismissed as an unimportant contribution since the food produced, while a good source of many nutrients, is often low on energy or protein so can only form a small part of one’s diet – perhaps this is an area for change.
While Colin touched on other points, I this this essentially summarises his thinking which he expands on in his current book:
Good Food for Everyone Forever: a people’s takeover of the world’s food supply (2011, Pari Publishing)
See also
www.campaignforrealfarming.org
www.colintudge.com
http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/agroecology