Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

I don't really believe that we are headed for imminent doom.

But I think there are a few factors which make the back-to-

the-land thing a little more feasible today:

 

- In the day and age of the Internet and global communications

more people are in a position to earn decent money while working

from home. Juggling between a money earning job and work on

the farm thus becomes a lot easier. Outdoor work is a welcome

change after hours at the computer.

- Increasing doubt in the ability of the food industry to provide

healthy products will increase opportunities for small and local

organic producers.

- Models of small-scale production, like the intensive market

gardening promoted by this group, can assist in setting up

new farms.

- The Internet provides a marketing platform for even the

smallest of specialty producer.

- Help for solving practical problems on the farm can be obtained

quickly and easily from the global village via the Internet.

- People moving back now are more experienced and have made

a carrier in something else, like the banker buying a vineyard

or the sales executive buying a cattle farm.

 

There could be any number of disagreements with the article, but I

don't know which ones you mean.  Sorry, never was any good at

quizzes.

 

Dieter Brand

Portugal

TradingPostPaul <tradingpost@riseup.net> wrote:

> Came across this and had some disagreements with it. There'll be a quiz ...
> ;-)
>
> paul
>  tradingpost@lobo.net
> ------------------------------------------
>
> The Back to the Land Movement:
> Why it Failed and Why we Need to Try Again Anyway
> By Alice Friedemann
> Thu Oct 11, 2007 8:29 pm ((PDT))
>
> Although much has been said about why communes and Utopian communities
> failed, little has been written about the fate of individual homesteaders.
>
> Eleanor Agnew, in her 2004 book, "Back from the Land. How Young
> Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back" (Ivan
> R. Dee), discusses the millions of young adults who tried
> homesteading. Agnew speaks from experience -- she went back to the
> land with her husband and two boys in Troy, Maine.
>
> Unless otherwise noted, most of what follows is based on Agnew's book. 
>
> Agnew estimates between 750,000 and one million people dwelled on
> communes in the 70's. Millions more went back to the land
> independently. On the whole the movement consisted of
>  educated,
> young, white, middle class men and women.
>
> Their rejection of the current system wouldn't have been possible if
> the overall economy hadn't been so wealthy, it was a luxury to be able
> to experiment.
>
> Many, if not most, were naïve and unrealistic about what it would take
> to make the urban to country transition. Some discovered you
> couldn't borrow money from banks without assets, had to acquire home
> building, car repairing, and farming skills from scratch, and nearly
> all grew tired from the hard work and discomforts. In the end the
> vast majority weren't able to live apart from the Capitalist society
> surrounding them.
>
> Why People Went Back to the Land
>
> There were many reasons people went back to the land. The oil crisis
> in 1973 led many to believe that the capitalist system was in imminent
> danger of collapse, so going back to the land would be a matter of
> survival.
>
> The value system of American society
>  was repulsive to many
> back-to-the-landers. They abhorred the rat race, boring jobs, crowds,
> the corrupt establishment; consumerism, destruction of wilderness, and
> advertising to get people to buy things they didn't need. Some also
> felt the need to "redeem their souls" because they'd done nothing to
> deserve the abundance they'd experienced. America has a long tradition
> of associating virtue with moderation, hard work, self-denial, and
> simple living. Many associated farming with the romantic notion of
> self-sufficient pioneers.
>
> Homesteaders wanted to invent a new and better civilization based on
> community, healthy food, a love of nature, and avoidance of toxic
> chemicals.
>
> Going Back to the Land was Hard
>
> The joy of raising animals on the farm was shattered when they were
> slaughtered. Agnew writes "How many of us had ever watched the blood
> spurt from a slaughtered animal before, watched the light fade from
> its eyes—by
>  our own hand, no less?"
>
> Goats could be ornery and raising animals meant no days off. Many
> animals died on the learning curve of animal husbandry.
>
> Farming was far harder than people realized. Some bought unsuitable
> land, i.e. land that was mostly rocks, which made building homes and
> starting gardens very hard. Good topsoil was washed away in storms. 
> Then there were assaults by wasps, flies, and no-see-ums, blistered
> hands, and aching muscles while tending crops, which in the end were
> often lost to drought, frost, hail, and pests. The surviving crops
> required hard work to harvest and prepare for storage.
>
> In the country, there were times when you had to scrape ice off the
> floors and walls, spend most of the year chopping wood to be sure
> there was enough when winter came. 
>
> Cold weather led to frozen pipes, immobile cars, slippery roads and
> paths, the risk of hypothermia, and extremely cold homes since most
> weren't
>  built to code. Snow entombed homes, equipment, and woodpiles.
> Uncovered wood piles froze into a block of wood ice blocks.
>
> Fires weren't as easy to make as Boy Scout camp fires. Wood needed to
> age for up to a year or it wouldn't burn well. If the wood was too
> green, it put creosote into the chimney, which could catch on fire and
> potentially burn your home down. 
>
> Cooking with wood required constant attention, you couldn't run off
> and do other chores, because you need to keep putting kindling in and
> ensure an even distribution of heat throughout the body of the stove,
> or the food would cook unevenly – burned on one side and raw on the
> other.
>
> Chopping trees down to build a home was another big ordeal. Clearing
> land was just the start of the hard work, after that, there was
> digging holes for the foundation through thick tangles of roots or
> bedrock. 
>
> Things were always going wrong, septic tanks blowing over,
>  tractors
> broken, escaped farm animals, broken chainsaws, falling trees gashing
> holes in cabins, and so on. 
>
> Middle class homesteaders had an idealized, romantic view of poverty,
> because they'd never experienced it and didn't know anyone who was
> poor. Poverty was what artists, writers, and musicians experienced in
> their creative pursuits. Poverty was hard-working, clean, and
> honorable. But Dorothy Allison, who grew up poor, wrote that poverty
> was "dreary, deadening, and shameful". In "Nickled and Dimed",
> Barbara Ehrenreich writes that poverty was "not a place you would want
> to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear."
>
> Most hadn't imagined being poor on the land would really be poverty –
> after all, they'd be growing their own food, building their own homes,
> and trading with community members for what was needed.
>
> What they hadn't reckoned with was that they could not be independent
> of the outside
>  economy. Being isolated meant even more dependence on
> cars, and repairs were expensive. People couldn't grow all of their
> own food and needed to get some items at the supermarket. And just
> about everything required money on the farm: seeds, animals, stoves,
> and so on. It wasn't cheaper to live on a farm than in the city. 
> Food and clothes weren't cheaper and there were fewer choices and
> opportunities to price compare. Health care was expensive and -- only
> taxes were cheaper.
>
> People and publications made it seem easy to live off the land
>
> Books like "Independence on a 5-acre Farm" made it seem it was no big
> deal to go back to the land. Mother Earth News had many articles like
> "Raise Worms for Fun and Profit" that misled people into thinking
> they'd earn enough money on the farm to pay for necessities. 
>
> Eliot Coleman told people that they didn't need health insurance, and
> since everyone knew how evil insurance companies
>  were, they were glad
> to opt out. Agnew devotes a hair-raising chapter to how wrong Coleman
> was – just because you're young doesn't mean there won't be a need for
> emergency care, especially on a farm doing heavy manual labor, where
> the odds are many times higher than an office job that an accident
> will occur. 
>
> Health care also sucked in the country – there weren't nearly enough
> doctors per capita, so there were usually long waits.
>
> Those who thought they could doctor themselves with herbs were
> sometimes dead wrong. Comfrey, which was supposed to cure just about
> everything, turns out to have liver damaging and carcinogenic effects.
> An alternative doctor prescribed Chinese herb cocktails that led to
> total kidney destruction in 100 women. Natural is not always better. 
>
> Scott and Helen Nearing were the role models for the back-to-the-land
> community. They had managed to build the ideal homestead working only
> four hours a
>  day, spending the rest of their time reading, writing,
> playing music, etc. They made it seem possible to do all this with
> very little cash.
>
> But the Nearings made money from speaking, writing books, and
> donations. They had many followers who worked on their farm free of
> charge. 
>
> Thoreau also made it sound easy to build a cabin and live in the
> wilderness. But the truth is, he was two miles from town, where he
> went nearly every day and visited friends, family, and he dined out
> often there.
>
> The counterculture had a reverse snobbery and one-upmanship about what
> was a necessity versus a luxury. But who could really decide that? 
> As Thomas Hine, author of "I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers"
> noted, if he came to your house and started throwing out things he
> thought were unnecessary, it wouldn't be long before you began arguing
> with him!
>
> Some see the voluntary simplicity movement (VSM) as the latest, new
> age
>  version of the back to the land movement, with similar problems. 
> What someone in the VSM movement would see as a luxury, say, buying a
> good suit to go on an interview with, would be seen as essential to
> the job seeker. What about deodorant, or dressing nice so that people
> are more likely to buy your vegetables at the farmers market? Hine
> summarizes the problem with VSM as it often "seems that our definition
> of a luxury is something we don't buy for ourselves".
>
> And then there is basic human nature. Human beings love things and
> have always exchanged items with each other. 
>
> Money was needed to buy and repair cars, absolutely essential in the
> country.
>
> Back from the Land – Why did people leave?
>
> Economics
>
> The economy was racked with inflation, in 1978 all prices rose 12%,
> and in 1979 prices rose 13%. Before then, a modest income could have
> provided most necessities.
>
> Many idealists had one-dimensional ideas
>  about capitalism, that it was
> nothing but ruthlessness, and that they could avoid the capitalist
> system by becoming self-sufficient.
>
> But Copthorne Macdonald concluded after several years that Alternative
> society never got large enough to separate from the mainstream
> society. You had to buy your tools at the hardware store since there
> weren't enough people making them on forges. The basic infrastructure
> of the economy forced people to buy outside the alternative lifestyle
> community. The bottom line is that small economies like communes and
> homesteads don't have the "size, complexity, cash flow, or diversity
> of goods and services to survive very well independently". 
>
> Doing something at home didn't pay well either. One farmer worked out
> he was making about ten cents an hour by the time he'd grown wheat and
> turned it into flour. Agnew spent three hours making ketchup and
> ended up with a mess and only half a jar of ketchup,
>  which she could
> have bought for 75 cents. Meanwhile, she could have earned a great
> deal more working for three hours.
>
> People had confused consumerism with cash – but even a sparse
> existence requires necessities that can't be made or grown on the
> homestead. 
>
> To afford necessities and improvements, people found they had to take
> jobs that were body destroying, degrading, and low paying, with no
> health care or benefits, that were also boring and sometimes
> dangerous. Those who'd thought the well-paid middle class careers
> they'd thought were hard or dull discovered otherwise. Since most
> homesteads were far out in the country, it wasn't usually possible to
> return to abandoned careers. 
>
> Agnew says that many discovered their work to be much like what Tom
> said to Amanda in the play "The Glass Menagerie". Here's how he
> describes his warehouse job: "I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar
> and battered out my brains—than go
>  back mornings! I go! Every time
> you come in yelling that Goddamn `Rise and Shine!' `Rise and Shine!' I
> say to myself, `How lucky dead people are!' But I get up, I go! For
> sixty-five dollars a month, I give up all that I dream of doing and
> being ever!"
>
> By leaving homesteads to work outside, they lost the time and energy
> needed to make themselves self-sufficient – time versus money. They
> needed time to build homes, weed, and so on, but they needed money to
> buy cement, garden tools, etc. 
>
> Just as some communes failed because they didn't manage the delicate
> balance between group cohesion and interaction with the outside
> community, so did homesteads fail as they tipped towards more time
> spent off the farm working than improving the homestead. People began
> to realize that rather than being homesteaders with outside jobs, they
> had unrewarding, low-paying jobs and happened to own a homestead. So
> many decided to return to the
>  middle-class high-paying, rewarding
> careers they'd abandoned.
>
> And many had not choice but to leave the land – they were bankrupt,
> out of savings if not deeply in debt. Many couples had children, and
> didn't feel it was fair to them to lead isolated lives on farms, far
> from good schools.
>
> In the end they found they had to participate in the economy,
> capitalism infused every aspect of life and was beyond overthrowing or
> disregarding. And Agnew asks, what if we had succeeded in making
> capitalism go away – "did we really want to trade places with people
> in the Third World who involuntarily lived back-to-the-land lives of
> simplicity, with no hope of escaping? 
>
> Divorce
>
> Despite love being what the counterculture was all about, a return to
> neighbor helping neighbor, the reality of never-ending hard work,
> poverty, and lack of privacy in one-room or small cabins took a toll
> on marriages. Agnew says no one has studied the
>  rate among
> back-to-the-landers, but she bets it was higher than the national
> divorce rate.
>
> When a marriage failed, one partner usually had to quit the land and
> go back to civilization. And the partner remaining on the land often
> found someone else who wasn't enamored of the homestead lifestyle. Or
> didn't find anyone, and couldn't cope with all the work on their own. 
>
> Commune failures
>
> Meanwhile, people who went back to the land via communes were
> returning as well. Agnew lists these reasons for commune failures:
> lack of clear goals and structures, aggravations of shared space,
> irritating personal habits, not liking each other once acquainted,
> exasperating interpersonal relationships, etc. Factions developed and
> people divided over all sorts of things – religion, pacifism versus
> self-defense, politics, etc. There were individual resentments
> between people, and just one out-of-sync person could rattle the whole
> group.
>  
>
> Children could be a problem – they were good at manipulating all of
> the adults to try to get stuff they wanted, causing all the grown-ups
> to fight among each other, and out-of-control kids added to irritation
> levels.
>
> The "unanimous consent" nature of decisions also caused problems –
> either there was a hung jury or underground resistance. Mutual
> consent favors the verbally aggressive and quiet people lose out, but
> giving in all the time soon made the silent ones resentful and feeling
> degraded. 
>
> New people threw communes off balance too. Initially a group tended
> to be young and single, but as people paired up and brought new
> partners to the farm, some of them didn't fit in with the group, and
> that caused conflict.
>
> Probably the most important factor that broke communes up was the
> resentment the hard workers felt for slackers. People disagreed about
> work contributions, money making efforts. People who worked
>  hard
> didn't want to share money with people who didn't work at all or hard
> enough. The workers tried to get shirkers to work four hours, to do
> assigned tasks, or contribute their fair share of money, but there was
> no way to enforce it, so these measures failed.
>
> And in the end, who owned the property became a matter of huge
> importance and caused many ruptures as this issue was sorted out among
> commune members.
>
> There are many in the Peak Oil community who believe that times will
> get so hard that individual homesteaders will be vulnerable to roving
> country gangs and urban dwellers fleeing the city in search of food. 
> They also believe that lone families don't have enough skills to
> maintain a separate existence as infrastructure declines and people
> are truly on their own. 
>
> If they're right, then it's especially important to understand why
> past communities ended. 
> Hine's "California Utopian Colonies" delves into why
>  these communes
> failed: 
>
> • Fountain Grove, Santa Rosa, 1875. Rich members backed out with
> $90,000. Newspaper sensationalism in the San Francisco papers
> suggested that there was a great deal of sexual license and immorality
> going on. 
> • Point Loma, 1897. The Los Angeles times accused them of being a
> "fanatical cult" protected by armed men under the hypnotic influence
> of founder Mrs. Tingley, and women and children were starving. There
> were also financial problems, which increased during the Great
> Depression, and the demands for housing were so great in WWII that the
> land was sold off. 
> • Icaria Speranza Commune, near Cloverdale. The Great Depression,
> lack of a dynamic leader, financial problems, and a lack of presses to
> make wine with. 
> • Kaweah near Visalia. Lost their land claim because the timber
> interests and government were hostile to them. They spent too much
> time building a road to the Sequoias rather than
>  farming, had an
> overly complicated form of government, constant internal bickering,
> schisms, factional divisions, lazy members, and the leader had an
> argumentative and undependable personality. Plus they didn't screen
> new members well enough. 
> • Altruria, Sonoma valley, 1894. Mainly economic. New members
> didn't bring in enough financial capital, the goods produced weren't
> always the best choices, and what was produced wasn't done in a
> coordinated fashion. 
> • Llano del Rio, Antelope valley. Politics and fighting among the
> members (too much democracy). Fraud. Not enough water caused them to
> sell and move to Louisiana, but these Socialists did not fit in with
> the greater community, which was very conservative. The great
> Depression caused a lot of free loaders to join. 
>
> Albert Bates, at The Farm in Tennessee, believes that if people want
> to join a commune, they should go to one that already exists – it's
> very hard to make
>  them work.
>
> The Malthusian Die-off didn't happen
>
> Back-to-the-landers hoped to escape the famine, overpopulation, war,
> and chaos that threatened to result from energy shortages and
> ecological destruction. But life went on, and friends and family on
> the outside were having it much easier, having more fun, and leading
> far more interesting and intellectual lives in cities. In the city
> you could make a social contribution, live in a warm home, go back to
> school, and attend cultural events.
>
> Fatigue
>
> The novelty and idealism of hauling cold clean spring water in heavy
> buckets over rough ground, endlessly chopping wood and getting up in
> the middle of the night to feed fires, running to outhouses in
> freezing weather, getting headaches from kerosene lamp fumes and other
> hardships grew thin.
>
> Agnew writes "We had grown tired. We now understood why our
> pioneering ancestors hand only lived to be 35 or 40… The
>  sheer
> physical discomfort alone was enough to change most of our minds".
>
> Bacl to the Land Conclusion
>
> Nearly everyone Agnew interviewed has very fond memories of their
> experiences and would do it all over again. 
>
> But few succeeded. According to Jeffrey Jacob's research on the
> success rate of back-to-the-landers, only 3% subsisted on a
> combination of cash crops and bartering, only 2% through "intensive
> cultivation of cash crops". The others all found themselves
> preoccupied with money:
> 44% worked full-time away from homesteads
> 18% had pensions and investments
> 17% survived on part-time or seasonal work
> 15% got their income from businesses they could run from home
>
> Peak Oil (water, topsoil), why aren't people going back to the land now?
>
> Of the very few people going back to the land now, many are motivated
> by the same Malthusian fears of their predecessors, especially since
> this time energy shortages are going
>  to be real, and resource
> shortages "Limits to Growth" predicted are evident. 
>
> Most young people are aware they're being handed a crummy planet, but
> they have a vague sense of unease, not a fine-tuned understanding of
> the situation, because the vast majority don't read -- they spend most
> of their time on computers with facebook and computer games, watching
> TV, and so on. 
>
> Those in the younger generation who are fully aware of the situation
> and taking Permaculture and bio-intensive workshops can't afford to go
> back to the land – farm land prices have skyrocketed. Many find the
>
> === message truncated ===

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