This isn’t an article defending the indefensible, in this case industrial farming, it is an article about people who are farmers. This article is a reminder to certain people that attacking others isn’t a good strategy. Farmers are under a lot of pressure, all the time.
Recent headlines :
“Farmers still face higher rates of suicide with one death every 10 days in Australia”
“Suicide toll on UK farming revealed”
“Record Number of American Farmer Suicides”
“Farmer Suicides in India”
etc
Most people are eating food that was grown on a farm, the number of people who are self-sufficient is very small.
Farming today is responsible for a huge lot of ecological and health problems, the latter including the high rates of farmer self-harm or suicide. BUT attacking people and what they do doesn’t help. Farmers tend to be conservative, it goes with the job, if something works why change it? Conservative people tend to react blindly to ad hominem attacks or the denigration of what they do and how they do it. Farmers are also on the front line of climate change because we are weather watchers in a quite different way to an office worker or a journalist. A hailstorm, a late frost, a dry spell may be an inconvenience to a lot of people, to a grower they can mean the loss of a harvest and a years revenue. A fellow chestnut producer went from 7 tonnes of harvest to 70 kilos because of a late frost last year.
What farmers love most of all is advice from people who aren’t farmers and don’t fully understand what we do. That said what farmers really love the most is blind criticism from people who aren’t farmers and don’t fully understand what we do.
For those who are confused that last paragraph was ironic.
You may be asking yourselves what set me off again. Well it was an article by George Monbiot published in the UK Guardian. The title? “Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all” So there we have it. George is asking us to adopt what is now sexily called “precision fermenting”. Basically it is Lab food not made this time from stem cells as is “lab meat” but from “microbes”. Cleverly fermented together by concerned and well meaning scientists (who work for the food industry) to produce planet saving novel foods (patented and sold by the food industry).
When has that ever worked out well for us? George, in his haste to save the world with fermented microbes doesn’t even mention the ‘precautionary principle’. These novel ‘foods’ are untested and even when they are they are short term tests until after a few years when we can get results from long term trials. But that’s ok because precision fermenting is, and I quote “a refined form of brewing” so it must be ok, mustn’t it?
Again “They produce a flour that contains roughly 60% protein, a much higher concentration than any major crop can achieve”. We find ourselves back to the old failed idea that food is about calories or how many nutrients they contain, despite the fact that this has been shown to be a very very short-sighted way of seeing food, but one which is ideal for the food industry. Throw a few things together, make sure that there are sufficient of the ‘right ‘ molecules and call it food. Nah… that’s not food.
Have a look at how nutritional advice has changed. Coffee good. Tea good. Butter good. Red wine good. Chocolate good. Eggs good. Morning muesli not good. Orange juice not good (sugar). Nutritional science has come to take a much wider view of what is nutritious and a lot of old advice, still to be found on government websites is now seen as flawed. For example calorie counting dieting has been shown to be a total fallacy for those people who want to lose weight, sport doesn’t help you do that either. Individuality is another criteria that is now seen as being fundamentally important when considering food. Some people can’t easily digest certain foods, legumes can cause bloating, heartburn and reflux and belly distension in a significant percentage if the population. These people don’t have certain types of bacteria in their intestines, the ones that help break down galacto-oligosaccharides in the small intestine.
There is a whole lot of communication going on in the body, hormonal and other forms of messaging going on all the time. Some ‘foods’ don’t trigger the appropriate messages and the body doesn’t know how to deal with them. This causes disease and modern synthetic foods are a case in point. The nutritional molecules in say an apple are combined and connected with other molecules in a sophisticated way, they aren’t just hanging around waiting to be absorbed by the digestive system. A molecule with theoretical nutritional properties may be unrecognisable to the body on it’s own. We know that many modern foods provokes inflammation which is not good and chronic inflammation is an unseen pandemic in today’s world.
Modern synthetic ultra transformed foods (UPF) are toxic and the cause of many health problems, how can George know that the ‘precision fermented foods’ won’t be the same. The food industry, despite the hundreds of scientific papers pointing out the toxicity of UPFs continue to promote them in the same way that the motor industry continues to promote their toxic gas spraying killing machines. Said industry will patent and promote their new ‘precision fermented foods’ even if they show signs of causing health problems. After all they have invested a lot of money developing them.
Farming, when done in correctly designed systems can produce high quality food and improve the environment. The best food is locally grown in good soil using heirloom varieties in an agroforestry system and consumed when everything is ripe and ready.
George again “If livestock production is replaced by this technology, it creates what could be the last major opportunity to prevent Earth systems collapse, namely ecological restoration on a massive scale” With regard to the various meats, well yes we need to move away from the idea that a day without a steak is a day lost but at the same time we don’t need to throw the whatsname out with the thingy. We can have, in fact we do have, animal raising systems that improve the land, reduce wildfire risk and produce high quality meat. Yes beef production is a major global problem because we want too much and most especially because of the systems we have built to produce it. I should note at this time that I’m vegetarian, but a lot of people aren’t. Higher quality is a selling point to reduce consumption, eat better eat less. You can have your grass cut by some sheep rather than your petrol lawn mower, have your village saved from a wildfire thanks to the bison, cows, sheep, goats and pigs roaming the woodland. All this rewilding that’s going on, great stuff but nobody is talking animals nor the future certainty of these newly forested areas burning because of a lack of herbivores. It would be good for George to understand that areas can be rewilded and can produce food. This is a part of what agroforestry is about.
It often seems as if too many people have bought into a Star Trek technophile dream and want nothing more than that at home they have containers that are refilled with stem cells or fermentation products that get 3d printed direct in a microwave oven according to the menu request inputted by the owner. Other people were more impacted by the humanitarianism of those TV series and less by the tech. The former people seem to forget that at the time portrayed in the series a sustainable, non-polluting infinite energy source had been discovered which isn’t the case today.
Finally, if we wish to change today’s farming systems we cannot do it by attacking those people who farm the land. This merely makes them more defensive and even less likely to change their ways. Working with and encouraging change through positive input and real working examples is the way forward.