[Diggers350] George Monbiot's 'Farm Free Future': Monbiotic Man, by Simon Fairlie
Tony Gosling
tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Sat Jan 7 13:59:27 GMT 2023
Monbiotic Man
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/monbiotic-man
Simon Fairlie assesses the farm-free future for
humanity spelled out in George Monbiots latest book 'Regenesis'.
Regenesis starts harmlessly enough. In his first
chapter George Monbiot illustrates the
complexities of soil structure by describing what
he sees when he looks at a sod dug up from his
orchard through a 40x magnifying eyepiece. It is
an elegant snapshot of the world beneath our feet
that we always vaguely knew about, but rather
took for granted until Merlin Sheldrake and
others unveiled some of its mysteries.
In chapter two he lays into industrial
agriculture, cataloguing failings and dangers
that many readers of The Land will already be
familiar with. The theme is carried forward in
the following chapter, where he targets
agricultural pollution and the excesses of the
intensive livestock industry. He then goes on to
visit three farms in the UK that are trying to
address some of these problems. The first is Ian
Tolhurst's stock-free market garden in
Oxfordshire, which rightly meets with Monbiot's
enthusiastic approval. His comments on the other
two holdings he visits are also sound: the
no-till arable farm would be more convincing were
it not reliant on glyphosate weedkiller. The
mixed farm employing mob-grazing and heritage
grains has high aspirations but low yields.
Much of this is music to the ears of any reader
supportive of agro-ecology and food sovereignty.
Even if not much of it is breaking news, it is
enlivened by Monbiot's acute observations and sharp turn of phrase.
However, it soon proves to be the overture to
something more discordant. Soft cop George is
buttering us up before hard cop Monbiot launches
in with the tough questioning. The crime, he
alleges, is not industrial agriculture, but
agriculture itself: "Farming, whether intensive
or extensive is the world's major cause of
ecological destruction." Overheating the world's
atmosphere and oceans through fossil fuel use apparently comes second.
The culprit is every farmer, big or small,
chemical or organic (with the exception of Ian
Tolhurst). A farm-free world is what Monbiot
hopes to see, where everyone enjoys farm-free
food. "We can now contemplate the end of most
farming, the most destructive force ever to have
been unleashed by humans." To this end he visits
the Solar Foods laboratory in Finland where
scientists are developing a high protein
foodstuff made from bacteria fed on hydrogen. He
eats a pancake made from the substance that he
believes "represents the beginning of the end of
most agriculture." Since this substance has no
name, I call it "studge", after the breakfast
cereal that readers of Saki may remember was
marketed on the basis that "people will do things
from a sense of duty that they would never attempt as a pleasure".
The Agribashers
George Monbiot is by no means the first writer to
launch an all-out attack on agriculture. Since
the publication of Marshall Sahlins' Stone Age
Economics in 1972 (see p.53 of this issue) there
has been a crescendo of variations on the theme
that it all went wrong when people started
keeping animals and growing crops. Examples
include Paul Shephard's call for humanity to Come
Home to the Pleistocene, the late James
Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia, Yuval Noah Harari's
contention that agriculture was "History's
Biggest Fraud", James C Scott's Against the
Grain, and the report Rethinking Food and
Agriculture by the think tank Rethinkx. Three of
these Shepard, Lovelock and Rethinkx propose
the same solution as Monbiot: feeding people, in
Lovelock's words, on "tissue cultures of meats
and vegetables and junk food made from any convenient organism".
Two differences between Monbiot's book and
earlier exponents of the agribashing tendency are
worth mentioning. Firstly there are now start-up
labs working to produce the junk food that will
replace agricultural products; and there are
generations of urban dwellers who are now so
divorced from the land, and so wrapped up in
cyberspace that they will probably be quite happy
to eat the stuff. Secondly Monbiot, through his
long association with The Guardian, has rather
more influence than most of his predecessors.
Regenesis was heralded by an hour-long
documentary on the subject on Channel 4. In 2013
when his book Feral came out, few people had even
heard of rewilding: now it is UK government policy.
Neither Spare nor Share
Monbiots's third chapter, which bears the
engaging title "Agricultural Sprawl", begins by
continuing his onslaught upon industrial
agriculture in the form of the factory chicken
farms currently polluting the River Wye (see The
Land 29). He continues in this vein for 17 pages
until he abruptly changes his tone:
"You might, by now, have decided that you want
nothing more to do with intensive farming: from
now on you will eat only meat, eggs and milk from
animals that can roam outdoors or have been
certified as organic . . . If so I can offer you little comfort."
The problem with grazing animals, he continues,
is that they occupy a rather large proportion of
the worlds land area: 28 percent according to
figures cited by Monbiot (slightly less than the
31 percent covered by forest).1 Another 12
percent is occupied by arable crops, and one
percent by buildings. The rest is desert or icy waste.
Forty percent of the worlds land surface is
devoted to agriculture, and as such is a threat
to global biodiversity because the great
majority of the worlds species cannot survive in
a farmed landscape. The reference for this
statement is a trio of UK papers on the benefits
of land-sparing as opposed to land-sharing.
But Monbiot is in favour of neither. Land-sparing
pursuing highly intensive agriculture over a
relatively small area in order to give
extensively farmed land back to Nature would
triple pesticide use and lead to even greater use
of arable land for animal feeds and biofuels.
Land sharing through organic farming and
regenerative agriculture has lower yields and
takes up too much land. The problem with intensive farming, writes Monbiot:
is not the adjective, it is the noun . . . We
appear to be trapped between two dangerous
forces: efficiency and sprawl. Farming is both
too intensive and too extensive. It uses too many
pesticides, too much fertiliser, too much water and too much land.
Rural Sprawl
It is indisputable that the task of nourishing
seven billion people has reduced the areas of
wilderness on the Earth to enclaves and condemned
numerous species to decline and extinction. Such
wilderness and many of the species associated
with it in the UK disappeared centuries ago. This
is a matter of genuine concern, which I will come back to it later.
But whether the conceit that this represents
agricultural sprawl is a helpful one is another
matter. Monbiot focuses mainly on the UK, and so
will I. Look out of the window on a train journey
from the less intensively farmed West Country up
to London and you will catch glimpses of a great
many landscape features: fields of wheat, maize,
potatoes or rape, meadows cut for silage or left
to grow for hay, pastures of every feasible
ecological status and condition, downland grazed
by sheep, water meadows where rivers weave oxbow
curves, old commons turning to scrub, fields left
to grow wild, stately parks with spreading oaks,
edge of town allotments, oak, beech or sycamore
woodlands, hazel coppice, conifer plantations,
spinneys, hedgerows, ditches and bogs.
Within this mosaic, thousands if not millions of
species find their niche. Most evolved over the
long period of time that preceded the neolithic
agricultural revolution, but many have benefited
from the disturbance caused by agriculture, or
adapted to its rhythms. According to Plantlife:
Hundreds of different wild flowers and
fungi have co-evolved over millennia with farmers
managing the land as hay meadows and pasture.
This unparalleled plant diversity provides the
life support for our invertebrates, birds,
mammals . . . More than 120 species of
wildflowers grow in arable habitats and together
make up one of the most threatened groups of
plants in the UK. Many of our most beloved plants
such as cornflower, corn marigold and
corncockle have drastically declined and no longer colour our farmland.
This diversity of landscape features and species
is the result of about 6,000 years of
co-operation between the people of this island
and its environment in the name of agriculture,
and to most peoples eyes it looks green and
pleasant, even if it doesnt have the romance or
mystery of Pleistocene wilderness. Yes, it has
become degraded and species are under threat
largely because of industrial farming methods. A
judicious measure of rewilding might help to
redress the balance. But complete abandonment of
agriculture would be detrimental to biodiversity,
since we would lose many of the wild species that
have successfully adapted to agricultural
disturbance, as well as the innumerable varieties
of domestic plants and animals that are utterly
dependent on a farmed ecosystem.
On your train journey you will also find that for
much of the time you cant see anything of the
landscape, because of all the trees growing up by
the side of the track. This is nature,
wilderness, trying to regain lost territory,
which it would do if Network Rail didnt arrange
for it to be hacked back from time to time. If
Monbiots farm-free landscape were let loose,
that is pretty much all we would see for much of
the journey. A return to the blanket of woodland
which covered much of Britain before our
forefathers let the light in and allowed sun- and
disturbance-loving plants and insects to
proliferate, might feel more like sprawl than the
highly variegated farming landscape that much of Britain enjoys now.
Urban Sprawl
Anyway, real sprawl is in a different league. It
multiplies on the outskirts of towns like Didcot
and Basingstoke, increasing in intensity, until
by the time you get to Woking or Slough it is
relentless. Rows of terraced houses give way to
new semi-detached estates while half-built
roundabouts map out the frontiers of future
building sites. Who are all these people? What do
they do, apart from taking in each others
washing? Why so many? By the time you get to
Vauxhall or Paddington the sprawl becomes
vertical, as office blocks and residential
towers, starved for space, stretch skyward like plants competing for light.
Monbiots hatred of farming has become so
visceral that the pastures and cornfields of the
West Country are in his view more to be feared
than the spread of concrete and tarmac. The cows
and sheep that we glimpse from the train window,
along with the pigs and chickens that we dont
see, he reckons threaten the carrying capacity of
the planet, more than the people who rear them:
While the human population growth rate has
fallen to 1.05 percent a year, the growth rate of
the livestock population has risen to 2.4 percent
a year . . . The biggest population crisis is not
the growth in human numbers but the growth in livestock numbers.
The biggest numerical increase in recent years no
doubt; but it is a bit rich to vilify cows, pigs,
sheep and poultry when they do little other than
eat, sleep, procreate and defecate, while human
occupants of the sprawling metropolis demand
cooked food, clothes, hot showers, central
heating, computers, motor-cars, hospitals,
shopping, foreign holidays and who knows what
else. The built environment may only occupy 11
percent of the UK land area, but it sucks up far
more energy and resources from ghost acres than the countryside does.
Yield-Blindness
Let us unpack this figure of 2.4 percent annual
growth in livestock numbers. Virtually all of
this increase is in the intensive chicken and
pork industries; very little is caused by cattle
or sheep. Monbiot cites USDA figures
showing that the number of cattle in the world
has increased by 15 per cent over the last 50
years, but all of this increase occurred between
the years 1971 and 1975. According to United
Nations data, this figure severely underestimates
the number of cows in Africa. But both sources
agree that in USA, Russia, East Asia, and Europe
the number of cattle is falling. The UK cattle
population has declined by 25 per cent since the early 1980s.2
What then of the factory farmed pigs and chickens
that account for nearly all of the annual 2.4
percent increase in livestock numbers? They are
mostly fed on cereals and soya beans, grown on
arable land. Sixty percent of the UKs arable
land is used to grow feed crops for animals and
on top of that we import large quantities of soy
and maize from ghost acres in the Americas.
The surest way to reduce the impact of farming
upon the natural environment would be to stop
using vast areas of arable land to grow
monocultural crops to feed to pigs and chickens
at inefficient conversion rates. Monbiots
enthusiasm for doing away with this inefficient
way of producing protein, and releasing several
million acres of UK land for other uses is shared
by large numbers of people within the
agro-ecology and regenerative farming movements.
But that is where agreement ends. Monbiot would
like to rewild any land so spared, whereas many
in agro-ecological circles would prefer to see
some of it used to enable a return to mixed
organic farms where ruminant livestock are part
of the fertility building cycle, and the protein
from factory farmed animals is replaced by pulses.
A month after the publication of Regenesis, the
Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) released its report
Feeding Britain from the Ground Up, which
advocates halving grain production, encouraging
mixed organic farming, growing more peas and
beans and ensuring waste food and by-products are
fed to livestock. The SFT calculates that in this
manner the UK could maintain or even increase
existing levels of food self-sufficiency, while
allowing an extra 2.5 million hectares for tree
planting and nature recovery (see page 12 of this issue).
A major weakness of Regenesis is that it doesnt
give a fair hearing to this approach. There is no
analysis of what it might achieve or require in
the way of land-use reallocation, or what carbon
and environmental benefits it might bring. The
one case study Monbiot provides of such a farm is
an experimental project on poor land with an
absurdly low level of productivity. I agree with
him that too many agro-ecological farmers are
yield blind . . . [using] large areas of land to
produce small amounts of food But he too is
blind to examples of far more productive organic
mixed farms, such as those which provide case studies for the SFT report.
Nor does he make any mention of default livestock
farm animals that can be fed off crop residues,
food waste, or grass maintained for other
purposes, such as nature conservation, fertility
building or open spaces. This was an approach he endorsed back in 2010.3
Since then, much research has been carried out
showing that these ecological leftovers are
substantial notably Hannah van Zantens
calculation that the processing and food wastes
generated by the sort of vegan diet that George
advocates, when fed to livestock, produce meat
sufficient to meet more than a quarter of all
human protein requirements.4 If this was one of
the 5,000 academic papers that Monbiot claims to
have read during the research for this book, he
apparently thought it was of no significance.
(See also the recent report from WWF, covered on page 12 of this issue.)
Homo High-Rise
Monbiots strongest argument for the development
and propagation of bacterial studge is founded on
environmental justice. While his favourite food
is a green peppercorn and lemongrass coconut
broth, and he has a horror of lardy cake, most
people like to eat animal protein and fat, not
least manual workers. There is growing demand
from the poor of the world to consume it at the
rate that people in industrial countries enjoy,
or indeed at the rate that we enjoyed it in the
pre-agricultural Pleistocene past in which the
metabolism of homo sapiens evolved.
The only way that this demand could currently be
satisfied is by feeding yet more cereals and soya
to pigs and chickens in factory farms, which
would be an environmental and animal welfare
disaster. However unappealing the prospect may be
of having the majority of our digestible protein
produced in a laboratory by white-coated geeks,
it is surely better than ploughing up increasing
tracts of virgin forest to feed animals
incarcerated in a prison from which the only exit is death.
Or perhaps not? The production of studge requires
large amounts of hydrogen, produced by
electricity. As noted in issue 30 of The Land,
almost every industry currently reliant on fossil
fuels is looking to hydrogen to reduce its carbon
emissions.5 A recent paper by AH MacDougal et al
warned that if limited supplies of renewable
energy are used to manufacture edible biomass
instead of replacing fossil fuels, the long term
result would be increased global warming:
maximum warming reduction from bacilliculture
would require deploying the technology only after
decarbonisation has reached its limits.6
However, suppose within a few decades there is a
flowering of the hydrogen economy, and sufficient
renewable energy is available to produce
bacterial protein cheaper than soy protein,
lab-grown fat cheaper than palm oil, and cultured
carbs cheaper than wheat or barley. Given the
smorgasbord of fake steaks, sham hams and other
skeuomorphic delicacies which Monbiot anticipates
could be fabricated using studge as a raw
material, it is not hard to imagine the new diet
being accepted by inhabitants of the vertical
metropolitan sprawl that already thrives in
countries such as China and South Korea.7
But what of the two billion peasants worldwide
who currently make their living from farming? Are
they to be dispossessed of their lands and herded
into high-rise buildings to peer at the natural
world through a computer screen, and occasionally
troop down to the gymnasium for exercise, while
their former fields are invaded by scrub? With
everybody eating the same substance, will the
demise of agriculture herald the final
convergence of tribal, regional and national
cultures into one banal global monoculture? This
is a scenario that captains of industry, whether
of capitalist or Sino-communist persuasion, aided
and abetted by their techno-vegan
eco-consultants, will no doubt be happy to accelerate.
An Agricultural Revolution
There is, however, an alternative application for
the studge, which is to feed it to animals. That
after all is what the soya protein that it is
destined to replace is used for and it is what
scientists originally thought their studge would be used for.
If it ends up fed to pigs and chickens in factory
farms on the periphery of megacities, that would
be a disaster both for the incarcerated animals
and for peasant farmers unable to compete with
this scale of industrial production. It would
result in vast surpluses of nitrogenous
phosphate-rich slurry concentrated in places where they served no purpose.
On the other hand if and it is a big if
factory farms fell out of favour, and instead the
studge were distributed to smallholders and
family farms scattered across the land mass, it
could provide a boost to organic agriculture,
especially in less developed countries.
As Monbiot points out, countries in the global
south are blessed with ample amounts of solar
energy with which to manufacture the stuff. If it
were made available cheaply to peasant farmers,
then they might choose to eat it if times were
hard; but otherwise they would probably find it
more advantageous to feed it to their livestock
and sell the resulting milk and meat to
town-dwellers who were bored with eating studge.
The result would be an increase in the volume of
manure available to farmers, and a corresponding
improvement in the fertility, health and yield of
their soils. In the clover-fuelled agricultural
revolution of early modern times, European crop
yields rose spectacularly through the expedient
of being able to keep more livestock, a double bonus.
A hydrogen-fuelled agricultural revolution could
do the same for farmers in the tropics. It would
render the chemical fertilisers of the
fossil-fuelled Green Revolution redundant,
replacing them with manure that would increase
soil organic matter and carbon, and improve
moisture retention. Increases in yields could
help to stem further incursions into tropical forest and savannah.
Priorities
Is this a science fiction fantasy? Perhaps, but
no more so than Monbiots farm-free dystopia.
However much one may disagree with his
conclusions, one may thank him for raising
important questions and intriguing possibilities
in a highly readable book. Perhaps he is making
extreme proposals simply in order to shift the
boundaries of the debate, and hence the
perception of what is mainstream, a tactic known as the radical flank effect.
The main worry is his repeated characterisation
of farming as the most destructive human
activity ever to have blighted the earth.
Agriculture has a lot to answer for; but does it
really bear comparison with the threat to life on
Earth as we know it from the oil and coal industry?
Farming and livestock husbandry have been with us
for around 12,000 years. The curves that describe
human population growth, global atmospheric CO2
levels and the extraction of fossil fuels all
share the same exponential rise over the last
century, and that is no coincidence. The
imperative is not to stop farming, but to phase
out fossil fuels very quickly. Cavalier polemics
that cast primary responsibility for our
predicament elsewhere are a dangerous diversion.
The Great Reshaft: Prince Charles Klaus Schwab's Great Reset
Problem Reaction Solution
Royal seal of approval for return to Davos:
Prince Charles unveils theme of 2021 event named 'The Great Reset'
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8385161/Prince-Charles-unveils-theme-Davos-2021-event-Great-Reset.html
Royal seal of approval for return to Davos:
Prince Charles unveils theme of 2021 event named 'The Great Reset'
By LUCY WHITE FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 21:51, 3 June 2020 | UPDATED: 22:36, 3 June 2020
The meeting of the world's self-styled elite in
the Swiss town of Davos will go ahead next January despite the pandemic.
Prince Charles, a long-time supporter of
organiser the World Economic Forum (WEF),
yesterday unveiled the lofty theme of the summit 'The Great Reset'.
However, Standard Life Aberdeen, which usually
spends around £3million on sending executives to
Davos each year, and hosts a cafe renowned among
delegates for its malt whisky has ruled out attending.
Prince Charles, a long-time supporter of
organiser the World Economic Forum, yesterday
unveiled the lofty theme of the 2021 Davos summit 'The Great Reset'
Chief executive, Keith Skeoch, told the Mail in
April that it was 'divisive' at a time when the
world was being ravaged by the coronavirus, and
that the money could be better-spent.
Founder Klaus Schwab said 'a great reset' was
needed, and insisted the meeting could 'build a
new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being'.
He added: 'The global health crisis has laid bare
the unsustainability of our old system in terms
of social cohesion, the lack of equal
opportunities and inclusiveness. Nor can we turn
our backs on the evils of racism and discrimination.'
Davos has gained a reputation for missing some of
the most important issues of the day.
The 2021 Davos summit will be held both in-person
and online, and will focus on reducing humans'
impact on the planet and how to move past the pandemic +2
The 2021 Davos summit will be held both in-person
and online, and will focus on reducing humans'
impact on the planet and how to move past the pandemic
This year's summit at the end of January, when
coronavirus was beginning to spread, saw very
little time dedicated to discussing the possible ramifications.
Teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg was
the star guest. In February, as the world began
to pay more attention to virus, JP Morgan boss
Jamie Dimon joked it may have spread the virus.
He said: 'The only good news from that is that it
might just have killed the elite.'
The 2021 summit will be held both in-person and
online, and will focus on reducing humans' impact
on the planet and how to move past the pandemic.
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