Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

"When we return to the land, we won't have enough land to feed oxen and
horses for farm labor and transportation."

Only if we insist on traveling as much as we do on cheap oil and want to
keep long commutes to work. Or insist on keeping mega-farms instead of
smallholdings intensively farmed by millions more to feed themselves and
their communities.

"We also need more organic, sustainable agriculture departments in
universities to shift agriculture to a sustainable mode as fast as
possible, but entrenched petrochemically funded departments make that
shift very difficult."

No kidding. How many ag departments have you endowed?

"For this to work though, the birth rate and immigration would need
to fall drastically."

Not if people learn how to live and grow naturally and sustainably. It
takes very little land to live well, but it does need cooperating local
communities. Of course the birth rate and immigration will NOT fall
drastically.

But in general IMHO the writer exaggerated, romaticicized and idealized the
back to the land movement. Few had such noble motives. Far too many just
used the fancy talk to hide the fact they were lazy, unskilled, soft, and
aimless. And by now they're retired or about to find out what they said
about the system is true.


paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 10/12/2007 at 9:27 AM TradingPostPaul wrote:

>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
>work too hard and pursue other careers.
>
>Yet people need to go back to the land – the fossil fuels that made it
>possible for one farmer to feed 100 people will not last much longer.
> Worse yet, one of the ways we were able to grow from 100 million to
>300 million people in the United States was to shift from oxen and
>horses, who did the most difficult and brutal farm labor, to tractors.
>Farm animals also provided transportation, but we shifted to cars and
>trucks.   Not having to feed oxen and horses for farm labor and
>transportation freed up a lot of land which was then used to grow food
>for people and build suburbia on instead.
>
>When we return to the land, we won't have enough land to feed oxen and
>horses for farm labor and transportation.  There isn't enough land to
>sustain both people and animals any more.
>
>Since what we face is a convergence of resource shortages, resulting
>in ecological collapse, I believe western civilization will go down
>hard and fast.  You can't compare previous civilizations to this one –
>there has never been a society so dependent on a non-renewable
>resource that makes every single aspect of survival possible: food,
>heat, air-conditioning, transportation, homes, clothes, health care,
>and so on.  Before the fossil fuel age, societies collapsed from
>climate change, wars, and so on.  But the "technology" and
>infrastructure didn't need to change for people to survive – they
>could just move back to the country and continue to use animal muscle
>power as they always had to farm and for transportation.  Most
>people's work and skills were directly related to survival already,
>even if they weren't farmers, they made bricks, did iron smithing, or
>some other job related to food, shelter, protective clothing and
>footwear, etc.
>
>To make the transition back to a mainly agricultural society, urban
>dwellers will need to spend a lot more money on food.  The only time
>most farmers ever made a decent living was after World War I, and city
>dwellers screamed bloody murder at having to pay so much, and used
>their greater political power to throw farmers back into poverty again.
>
>The organic, local, and slow food movements are gaining momentum,
>especially among wealthier people who can afford to pay more for food.
> But it's likely that once energy shocks hit, there'll be massive
>unemployment and inflation, deflation, or stagflation, and many people
>will be hard-pressed to afford food.
>
>We also need more organic, sustainable agriculture departments in
>universities to shift agriculture to a sustainable mode as fast as
>possible, but entrenched petrochemically funded departments make that
>shift very difficult.
>
>Pest management will be difficult too.  Migrating to IPM (Integrated
>Pest Management) and getting rid of all those agrichemicals requires a
>great deal of education to a massive, non-existent, new cadre of
>students, since it requires understanding of many different fields to
>make it work, such as entomology, soil science, botany, plant
>diseases, irrigation, and so on.
>
>But the huge number of agricultural students we need isn't enrolling
>at universities.  In "Agriculture schools Sprucing up their image",
>the Los Angeles Times has an article about how agricultural schools
>are seeking students because large numbers of agricultural workers are
>nearing retirement, but few are applying.
>
>So, if you can talk any young people you know into taking their offer
>up, they will probably be grateful one day – since their expertise
>will be essential. And  there will come a time when food prices are so
>high and so many people are unemployed that people will band together
>to jointly buy land, especially if the alternative is to be a poorly
>paid laborer on someone else's farm.   The expertise of those who've
>gotten IPM and other agricultural knowledge at universities will make
>it much more likely these enterprises will succeed.
>
>This time around, the model to follow for a group endeavor is already
>here – Community Supported Agriculture.  Lazy members who don't farm
>their tract will earn far less than hard-working members.  And the
>pooling of resources will have a huge advantage over individual farms,
>if the members can learn to get along and cooperate (and find a good
>leader).
>
>These CSA's should be forming now, because it can take ten years to
>learn the necessary skills.  But there's no central place for people
>to find each other like in the `70s, when Mother Earth ads helped
>people find one another to pool money to buy land with.
>
>Given how little time is left before disruptions in energy start to
>make life unpleasant, there is a chance that at some point, if there's
>not chaos, local or state governments will have to put citizens on
>large collective farms, and this will likely lead to a feudalist or
>fascist form of government.   It will be hard to avoid this no matter
>what, because land ownership is concentrated in so few hands.
>
>However the future unfolds, less and less energy will mean that
>eventually up to eight or nine in ten survivors will find themselves
>going back-to-the-land.  The people who don't make it to the
>agricultural level will have died from starvation, succumbing to
>pandemics, fighting abroad or here for a slice of the declining pie.
>
>It would be better if people chose this future with hope and courage.
>  For this to work though, the birth rate and immigration would need
>to fall drastically.
>
>Farming can be an immensely satisfying and rewarding lifestyle.   It
>would be best for democracy and preserving topsoil, water, and forests
>if Americans could embrace reality and take appropriate
>back-to-the-land action.
>
>
>
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