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Radical Agrarianism 5

If you're in the middle Tennessee area and are interested in either the practice or politics of agriculture, this upcoming weekend is for you!  First, on Friday, March 25th from 9 am to 4 pm, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers will display the Mobile Slavery Museum at the edge of Alumni Lawn on the Vanderbilt Campus.  At 5:30 pm that same day, join workers from the C.I.W. and Rev. James Lawson in Benton Chapel for a round-table discussion on "The Politics of the Lunch Counter."  Both events are free and open to the public.  Below is the flier for the events, after which is some background information on both.  

Mobile Slavery Museum:
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers comes out of a community of low-wage tomato pickers of Haitian, Mayan, and Mexican descent.  Many speak different languages, and many are highly mobile--moving throughout the country during the agricultural season.  They work in a region of Florida that supplies 90% of the nation's tomatoes, and has been called "ground zero for modern-day slavery' by the U.S. Dept. of Labor.  And yet the CIW has not only helped prosecute slavery cases in the region, they have also pressured food giants to help end exploitative conditions in the fields.  McDonalds, Burger King, Sodexo, and six other global corporations have signed with the CIW to pass on a penny per pound of tomatoes directly to farmworkers, and ensure that their tomatoes are sourced responsibly. 

With these successes already in place, the CIW is currently targeting Publix grocery stores, which has until how avoided responsibility for the conditions which bring them discount produce, stating "If there are some atrocities going on, it's not our business."

The Museum, which has been visited by former president Jimmy Carter and the U.S. Secretary of Labor, shows the region's long heritage of exploiting farm laborers--from slavery to convict labor, to current cases of slavery in Florida's fields.  But it also shows the unprecedented agreements being reached between farm-workers, farm-owners, and food corporations to end those abusive conditions.

The Politics of the Lunch Counter:

A group of migrant farm-workers from some of the most exploitative working conditions in the country are fighting an abusive food system--and they're winning. To cap off the day-long exhibition of their award-winning Museum of Modern-Day Slavery, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers will be joined by Reverend James Lawson, one of the original architects of the Civil Rights Movement lunch counter sit-ins to reflect on food politics in America.

Second, on Saturday March 26th is the annual meeting of the Tennessee Organic Grower's Association, which includes farm tours on Friday and a conference on Saturday.  For the interested, here's the press release, conference schedule, workshop descriptions. 

F.L.A.G. 2: Accounting

As I've discussed with several of the potential founding members of middle Tennessee F.L.A.G. - Farmers for Local Animals and Grain - an important principle for such an organization is open accounting.  By opening our ledgers to farmers and eaters alike, we encourage a measure of transparency that is often obscured by the sheer scale and norms of privacy that typically govern "business" endeavors. 

In fact, from my perspective, it is precisely this conception of a farm as a business - of every family farm a profit-maximizing corporation unto itself - that I want to question.  From the ancient Greeks to the current seal of the State of Tennessee, agriculture and commerce have long been representative of two distinct realms of human activity.  Yet lately that's all agriculture is taken to be.  If you can't make money at it, it's not worth doing.  And maybe that is indeed the case. 

But in any case, such a question certainly is not one that can be answered in the abstract and according to "theory alone," whatever that may mean.  This question of agrarian economics, in other words, remains for me an open question, open to further inquiry and experimentation.   In such a spirit, in the next post I will present the facts and figures for Ecotone in 2010.  To spice it up a bit, I'll present these numbers in a format similar to the Harper's Index.  Finally, to get a better understanding of the sentiment behind my approach to accounting, I cannot but recommend that you watch the wonderful short-film The Accountant (2001) as soon as possible.  Then you will also understand that, as with all accounting, with mine there is inevitably a 4.5% margin of error, plus or minus. 

Swords Into Plowshares

For both my own reference and yours - should you be interested - I'm posting several relevant links, the first of which is a recent New York Times article on efforts helping veterans become farmers.

Next is a recent report published by the Applied Research Center on the racial wage gap in America's food industry, entitled "America's Food Sweatshops".

Finally, on a more hopeful note, above is a video about an exciting new project - Food Corps - that is just getting started on a national scale.  Eat Local.  Live Free.

Radical Agrarianism 4

The Food Politics Group at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt recently read and discussed James C. Scott's new book, The Art of Not Being Governed. In addition to being a professor of political science and anthropology, Scott is also the director of the Center for Agrarian Studies and the editor of its book series, all at Yale. At once intuitive and unorthodox, the "crudest version" of Scott's thesis turns on the following basic formula:

"Political and military supremacy requires superior access to concentrated manpower close at hand. Concentrated manpower, in turn, is feasible only in a setting of compact, sedentary agriculture, and such agro-ecological concentrations are possible, before the twentieth century in Southeast Asia, only with irrigated rice. These relationships are, however, not deterministic.... Irrigated rice...is best understood politically as the most convenient and typical means of concentrating population and foodstuffs."

Drawn from what was for me the most revelatory chapter, "Concentrating Manpower and Grain," here are a few more choice selections:

"The abundance of arable land in Southeast Asia favored shifting cultivation, a pattern of farming that often yielded higher returns for less labor and produced a substantial surplus for the families practicing it. What constituted an advantage for the cultivators, however, was profoundly prejudicial to the ambitions of would-be state-makers. Shifting cultivation requires far more land than irrigated rice and therefore disperses population....[C]oncentration is the key. It matters little how wealthy a kingdom is if its potential surplus of manpower and grain is dispersed across a landscape that makes its collection difficult and costly."

"Conditions in a flourishing wet-rice heartland, then, were favorable to the development of what might be called the premodern state's ideal subjects. That ideal is represented by densely packed cultivators of permanent grain fields who produce a considerable annual surplus."

"The paramount importance of manpower rested, in the final analysis, on military considerations. Occupation of a fertile rice plain, of an important temple complex, of a choke point along vital trade routes was of little avail if it could not be successfully defended. This homely fact goes to the very heart of the analysis of power in such premodern political systems. Rather than wealth begetting power, as it might in Lockean systems, where the state's first duty is to defend citizens' life and property, in premodern systems only power can guarantee property and wealth. And power, before the technological revolution in warfare, was largely a matter of how many men a ruler could field; power in other words, boiled down to manpower."

"Less reliant on volatile trade, more hierarchical, more insulated from food-supply crises, and capable of feeding quite massive armies, these ['coercion-rich and capital-poor,' landward'] agrarian states might lose a battle or even a war, but their staying power over the long haul tended to prevail."

"The imperative of concentrating population and grain production, in fact, confronts all would-be state-makers who must operate in an environment where open land is abundant and military technology simple. Some means must be devised to counteract the tendency of the populace to disperse widely so as to take full advantage of the hunting, foraging, and less labor-intensive farming techniques available to them."

"The objective of this [early modern state-making] policy was, it seems, to starve the population into grain farming and subjecthood by separating them from the open commons."

If you're interested in hearing Professor Scott speak at length on this book, check out the following lecture; for a more informal interview, have a look here; for the relationship of Scott's work to the libertarian tradition, have a listen to this.

Farming and Philosophy 3

In the last few weeks, I've had occasion to recall the following passage from Berry in The Way of Ignorance:

"One may begin as an agrarian, as some of us to our good fortune have done, but for a farmer agrarianism is not enough. Southern agrarianism is not enough, and neither is Kentucky agrarianism or Henry County agrarianism. None of those can be local enough or particular enough. To live as a farmer, one has to come into the local watershed and the local ecosystem and deal well or poorly with them. One must encounter directly and feelingly the topography and the soils of one's particular farm, and treat them well or poorly. If one wishes to farm well, and agrarianism inclines to that wish above all, then one must submit to the unending effort to change one's mind and ways to fit one's farm."

So often, it seems, farming is done the way it's done because that's the way it's always been done. In fact, this tendency to be "stuck in a rut" seems both deep and wide in agrarian communities, and points to an important sense in which such communities are conservative by both nature and tradition. What works, works; it is what it is. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Sometimes, however, we aren't able to see what doesn't work, or isn't working, precisely for the way certain things work.

Enter William James, one of the founders and popular voices of American pragmatism, who once wrote that habit is "the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent." The radio program On Point with Tom Ashbrook recently did a show on James, which in turn made me think of Berry - perhaps in one of his more flexible moments - and again about the relationships between agrarianism and pragmatism. Have a listen to the show here, if you're interested.

All this is to say that it is quite difficult to maintain such a flexibility, such an open, experimental orientation to your plans, especially when they are painstakingly constructed in advance and often involve financial investments. Indeed, sometimes it seems that farmers - myself included - are especially prone to fall into the habit of Thoreau's "worldly miser" in "Walking," who failed to see that "heaven had taken place around him, and did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise."

To avoid such paths, I offer the following passage from James' essay "The Sentiment of Rationality" as an antidote, as well as an amendment to what are ongoing notes toward a more radical agrarianism:

"Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their rationality. The empiricist school has been so much struck by this circumstance as to have laid it down that the feeling of rationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing, and that no other kind of rationality than this exists. The daily contemplation of phenomena juxtaposed in a certain order begets an acceptance of their connection, as absolute as the repose engendered by theoretic insight into their coherence. To explain a thing is to pass easily back to its antecedents; to know it is to easily foresee its consequents. Custom, which lets us do both, is thus the source of whatever rationality the thing may gain in our thought."

Radical Agrarianism 3

Next week the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (C.I.W.) will bring to Nashville the Mobile Slavery Museum, which documents contemporary agricultural slavery in the balmy fields of Florida. On Monday the museum will be parked on Alumni Lawn on the Vanderbilt campus from 9 am to 4 pm. Check out this article, and the links above, for more information. Eat local. Live free.

The 11th Commandment

Even though it's longer than all the others combined, I thought this suggestion for an 11th Commandment, quoted by David Montgomery in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (2007), was appropriate:

"Thou shalt inherit the Holy Earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt safeguard thy fields from erosion...and protect thy hills from overgrazing by thy herds, that thy descendants may have abundance forever. If any shall fail this stewardship of the land...thy descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or perish from the face of the Earth."

- W.C. Lowdermilk, Conquest of the Land Through 7,000 Years, Agricultural Information Bulletin 99 (1953), U.S. Dept. of Agriculture

Gleaners

Speaking of eating free, I'm happy to report that we're now participating in the Food Reclamation Project, a program organized through Hands On Nashville. Vendors at the Nashville Farmer's Market support the project by donating their "less-than-prime" produce (read: flawed, mostly superficially, thrown away due to our fickle industrial food aesthetic) to a group of volunteers who further sort it into human-grade quality and not. The former is then delivered to local feeding agencies and homeless shelters, while the lesser quality foodstuffs are reincorporated into the local agro-ecology.

Until recently, most of this food was directed to local community gardens for composting, which is one great way to remove organic material from the waste stream and put it back into the food cycle. Now, however, we are coordinating with the project to pick up this busted, bruised, and slightly moldy (but sometimes astonishingly perfect!) food two days a week for the Ecotone sounder. Last week, I could barely fit it all in my truck!
As you may know, pigs are remarkably similar to human in digestive anatomy. With single chamber stomachs they are omnivores, and are well-known for eating most anything and everything you put in front of them. This, of course, doesn't mean that they should or would eat those things, if given a wide variety from which to choose; but it is why they are traditionally considered unclean to eat. But it's also exactly why pigs were domesticated: because of their remarkable ability to turn all or most agricultural by-products into edible animal protein. Whether it was compost from the garden, whey from the dairy animals, or scraps from the kitchen, pigs are a crucial part of the feeding ecology for many smallholders and householders - that is, those subsistence agriculturists comprising three-quarters of the world's population.

In this sense, I've been thinking about how this project in general, and the pigs roles in particular, are good examples of gleaning, an ancient set of practices associated with the common rights to gather the remainder left in a field after harvest. Needless to say, all the pigs at Ecotone are happy to oblige in this role, and sometime in the future - after we've helped turn that so-called waste into protein - we'll return it to the project in the form of food.

Starvation and Abundance

Here are two articles I recently came across concerning the global food system: "Why Big Ag Won't Feed the World" in The Atlantic, and "Feast and Famine" in Origins.

Radical Agrarianism 2

By way of responding to AD's comments on my agrarianism essay, I thought I'd post some relevant passages from Wendell Berry's The Way of Ignorance that my friend Brian Miller of Winged Elm Farm in Philadelphia, TN recently sent me.

The major fault of I'll Take My Stand, Berry says, is that the "agrarianism of most of the essays, like the regionalism of most of them, is abstract, too purely mental. The book is not impractical - none of its principles, I believe, is in conflict with practicality - but it is too often remote from the issues of practice. The legitimate aim (because it is the professed aim) of agrarianism is not some version of culture but good farming, though a culture complete enough may be implied in that aim....As a regional book, I'll Take My Stand mostly ignores the difficulty and discipline of locality."

"The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm. Farming becomes a high art when farmers know and respect in their work the distinct individuality of their place and the neighborhood of creatures that lives there."

"Having settled even in so marginal a place as this, undertaking to live in it even by such marginal farming as I have done, one is abruptly and forcibly removed from easy access to the abstractions of regionalism, politics, economics, and the academic life. To farm is to be placed absolutely. To do the actual work of an actual farm one must shed the cliches that constitute "The South" or "My Old Kentucky Home" and come to the ground."

"One may begin as an agrarian, as some of us to our good fortune have done, but for a farmer agrarianism is not enough. Southern agrarianism is not enough, and neither is Kentucky agrarianism or Henry County agrarianism. None of those can be local enough or particular enough. To live as a farmer, one has to come into the local watershed and the local ecosystem and deal well or poorly with them. One must enounter directly and feelingly the topography and the soils of one's particular farm, and treat them well or poorly. If one wishes to farm well, and agrarianism inclines to that wish above all, then one must submit to the unending effort to change one's mind and ways to fit one's farm."

Notes Toward a Radical Agrarianism

Recently, I had an essay published in Ameriquests (vol. 7, no. 1), an online journal dedicated to "real and metaphorical quests towards 'America'". This essay came out of several years of discussions with the Food Politics Group at the Robert Penn Warren Center, a summer fellowship in Guatemala and Cuba with the Center for the Americas, a panel at the 2008 Radical Philosophy Association conference, and innumerable conversations with many of you. These ideas, of course, are still in motion, and so your comments are encouraged.