If you have not seen the Farm for a Future documentary then I strongly suggest you take the time to see it. It is a great introduction to Permaculture thinking and maps out the dilemma that all farms are having to face up to. As the cost of oil and diesel rises the ever smaller profit margins in agriculture are eroded away, exposing the absolute reliance our food production systems have on cheap energy.
So what is the way forward? Many farms are being pushed into ever more capital intensive systems, bigger fields, more inputs, bigger machines and fewer workers, less room for nature and wildlife and much more debt. The movie, FOOD INC, which came out last year paints a pretty terrifying picture of corporate large scale agriculture – its impacts on landscapes, soil, animals and the farmers themselves. It is not surprising that so few people want to be involved in agriculture – and a surprising stat that comes out of farm for a future is that the average age of a British farmer is 60!. So the average farmer is 4 years from retirement age, a great many carry on into their 70′s not least becasue the next generation is not keen to take on the mantel.
So what is the future for farming? Large scale industrial agriculture is not very interested in marginal hilly small farms like the one we will be studying on. You can’t fit a 80 foot wide combine in one of their fields anyway. I cant but help think that the smaller marginal farms are the edge from which a new 21st century type of agriculture will emerge from, and one that will give us all new ideas and new approaches to managing the landscape and the natural environment. If we cant have big machines in the post peak oil world, then the only choice is going to be to reintegrate people back into the system. Without having to use big machines having smaller plots with much greater diversity of production is going to make more sense. Chris Dixon, the permaculture pioneer in Dolgellau, also featured on Farm for the Future, thinks that really the garden is the most productive farm of land use, small scale, diverse and allowing a great attention to detail. Having spent 20+ years on his 7 acre small holding he is now convinced even that is too big to properly manage responsibly.
Of course there are no simple answers, and I suspect that farms in the future, the near future, will start performing and being valued for performing a much wider set of functions. Wildlife habitat protection, re-instating wetlands and improving upland water storage, carbon sequestration via no plough systems, bio char, coppice and timber production will also become key functions for farming as well as food production.
Our market driven econmy is very ready to make use of ‘free’ assets like soil air and water, and I suspect that the only way to get these fundamentals valued is to put a price on them, in some way or other. Take bees and other insects for example, treated at best as a minor annoyance, and more widely as pests and are killed in great numbers by toxins and habitat destruction yet they perform vital functions like pollination, disease control and ecosystem regulation. They dont charge and we dont value them, in fact we wage a chemical war on them, then wonder why bird numbers have plummeted over the last few decades.
It is going to be a fascinating couple of weeks and I will certainly be writing lots more about it. There are still places on the 2 week course available so I hope anyone reading this will pass on the word about to any potentially interested parties.
There is a more detailed leaflet about the course available here (Hi res 4mb, Low res 1mb), as well as a web page on my main site
Permaculture Design Course advert
