Features
The Future of Farming
Ever since modern chemicalised agriculture became widespread – a period that actually embraces no more than the last half-century of human existence – we have tended to neglect the Culture part of agriCulture.
The cost of this half-century of experimentation – the greatest mass experiment in human history – has been high, too high. Allowing the food production system of the United States to become based on corn, for example, has led to a situation where some children in the wealthiest and most overfed nation the world has ever known actually suffer from rickets. That's if they don't suffer from obesity and diabetes. King Corn has sickened the nation, emiserated its livestock, and polluted its rivers, seas and land.
Terminal decline
Here in Ireland, Teagasc has begun a three-year research project that will seek to understand, and explain, why more farmers are committing suicide. The farmer, once the proud custodian of the land, once the provider and purveyor of our daily bread, has become a cog in a gigantic wheel over which he has no control. The result, unsurprisingly, has been despair.
The writer Colin Tudge has described agriculture as “The greatest by far of all human endeavours... all history, all culture, all technology feed into it, and in turn, it feeds into everything else we do”. But if illness, and suicide are now the net results of what our agriculture is creating, then something is rotten in the state of agriculture.
You could despair about this global, and local, picture, but there is no need to. In fact, the situation in a global context has become so bad that the chemical agricultural experiment has all but run its day. The system of the last fifty years is not sustainable, and in a changing world it cannot, and will not, be sustained.
Chemicalised agriculture is a dinosaur – big, small-brained, unwieldy, unfit for its purpose – and it is lumbering towards its death. The promoters of bad science such as genetic modification promise us that they have the means to give the beast a new lease of life, but don't be fooled: genetic modification is no more than a life-support machine for a terminally ill behemoth.
Taking control
So, what will agriculture look like in twenty years time? How will it change and develop? And what can it promise us that will mark an improvement on what we have been offered for the last fifty years?
First off, I think that the Food Commodity concept, wherein food is anonymous, bland, and a product of no place of origin, will be replaced by Food Citizenship.
This has already begun, as shown by phenomenon such as box delivery schemes, farmer's markets, and especially in community agriculture schemes where local people pay upfront to support local farms and farmers who then produce their food. In all of these examples there is a strong element not simply of participation by people, but actually of ownership by people of the food they consume. People are taking charge of the food they own: they are becoming citizens, not simply consumers.
Principled production
Food Cost, currently the fig leaf behind which supermarkets hide the fact that the food they sell is amazingly expensive, will be replaced by the Food Footprint.
You will read the label not to enquire about what cocktail of chemicals modern science has shoehorned into your food, but to see the extent to which the foodstuff has impacted on the environment. The reason why this will be so important is because young people today rate ethics and environment at the top of their food priorities, so protecting the environment by producing food locally will be the main factor affecting purchase.
That ethics bit is also important, as it will manifest itself in greater concern for animal welfare. Alongside the Food Footprint, I suspect we will see a Food Heart: this animal was raised with respect and care for its welfare will be the message.
Natural assets
Food Chemicals will be replaced by Food Care, the knowledge by a farmer of how to use the resources of nature to produce the best possible food. Chemicalisation renders all farmers equal, and equally bad. Chemicals filter out skill, experience, local knowledge, individuality and creativity, and replaces them with a one-size-fits-all monotone. As fossil fuels are saved for essential things, we will realize that they are not needed down on the farm, in the form of chemicals, and never have been.
And the Food Care concept will work like an Appellation Controlee system, a guarantee that the food has been produced in best accord with local climactic conditions. The best farmers will take it even further: they will label their produce as if it was chateau produced, bearing their name, the conditions of production, the techniques used to ensure that the food product is simply the best it can possibly be.
Food Citizenship. Food Care. The Food Heart. The Food Footprint. These are not pie in the sky nonsense. They are techniques with which to construct the agriculture we need to sustain ourselves, and our planet, and to express our skills at agriCulture. I know many farmers, and many food citizens, who are already practicing these concepts. Over the next twenty years, I believe they will become the lingua franca of our agriculture. The future looks bright.
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