Back to the land
Why moving to the country
will save us all
BY Geoff Heinricks
Illustration by Sarah Lazarovic
To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
Mahatma Gandhi
We are deep in the shit. Only a fool will dispute this. Sure, lately we embrace somnambulant palliatives in the form of Al Gores hectoring warbles, but An Inconvenient Truth hasnt accomplished a thing. We prove that each and every day, which continues on the same as yesterday.
Should Al and Tipper sell their 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, or their 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Virginia, or their house in Carthage, Tennessee, and buy a 20- to 40-acre property and revive a mixed small farm ... now that would do a lot more good than another self-deprecating Gore appearance with Jon Stewart or your local churchs free screening of Gores slide show.
Putrid ooze laps against our necks. The few elevating rocks were unconsciously gripping with our toes are about to slip out forever. We are set to become the poor, the dispossessed, the homeless and the hungry. And it will happen so swiftly the anger and instability are going to be frightening in scope. It may unleash political and social horrors we dont believe North Americans are remotely capable of.
Social violence. Fascism. Slavery.
Its dirt simple. Gandhi warned us. In forgetting how to dig the earth and tend the soil we have lost ourselves.
Its unsettling to write paragraphs like that, and maybe its eye-glazing to read them ... however, pay attention to your own instinct. Remember the ice storm of 1998, the northeastern blackout a few years back or Hurricane Katrina? Do you recall how much money we all burned through in our gas tanks last year? Torontoniansdid you notice being informed recently to expect big municipal tax increases with no increase in services? Those are not interesting events that break up the homogenous days and months of bloated North American life. Its a second away from being the new normal.
Nobody knows what will flick the first domino that will set in motion our frightful destitution. A bomb in Saudi Arabia? Another Bushite war? The massive foreclosure of American suburbia? A poor agricultural year in a few near or distant lands? I dont know either. But I cant delude myself that all the elements are in place for a perfect economic storm. And you shouldnt either.
When my wife and I fled Toronto 12 years ago, it wasnt because of this. I could sort of see where things might be heading, but didnt believe we were stupid enough to let it go that far. Our move was simple: somehow I had convinced her that leading a useful life growing wine in a forgotten corner of Ontario was a better existence than being media weasels. The media did pay fairly well, and we were in the biggest (though not always the most amusing) city in the nation, but it was time either to settle into the lifelong commitment of buying a modest $500,000 starter home ... or change our lives. Delaying a radical move meant we probably never would be brave or rich enough to do it.
So we did. And we enjoy and thriveif not actually prosper in a relatively unspoiled rural community of history, memory, collective existence ... and a balance of town, village and farm.
Certainly, to a degree, we are lucky, just like those who bought that $500,000 Toronto starter home in 1997 and are now certainly paper millionaires. That is if they didnt move two or three times in the intervening years with the leverage of their rising equity to a much bigger place in a tonier neighbourhood. Or didnt cash out their equity with consumer loans. If the United States foreclosure crisis worsens and spreads north, and housing prices tank here, too, well, a lot of real and imagined wealth is going to evaporate. The mortgage payments wont, though, nor will the rising municipal taxes, coupled with those nifty declining municipal services.
We have a small 40-acre farm, free and clear of mortgage, and a small village house almost paid down. Its not much, but if the crops in California or Florida or Mexico wither or are washed away, or become contaminated and are recalled, or double or triple in price due to fuel expense, we can feed ourselves and a handful of other families. We can sell or trade for what we need. We can warm ourselves with wood. And we can band together with neighbours and help each other.
Not much, like I said, but apart from the last two or three generations of North American culture, its the story of most of the world. Our last few generations have been the profound exceptionthe reasons we have forgotten ourselves. Personally Im much happier in the dirt than in the shit.
Canadas rural population has grown only slightly over the past 75 years. In 1931 our total population was just a bit over 10 million, so fully half of all Canadians lived outside cities. By 2001, only about 725,000 Canadians lived on a farm anymore. And only 2.4 percent of Canadians worked directly on farms, according to StatsCan. The number of farms dropped 10.7 percent between 1996 and 2001 and has probably declined another 10 percent since then.
For some reason, Western nations take a perverse pride in having two or three percent of a nation feeding the rest, but the statistics are muddled. The Canadian food processing industry employs 240,000 peoplemostly in urban areas nowand makes up 10 percent of the nations total manufacturing sector employment, one of the top three.
The importance of agriculture climbs even higher when you figure out the percentage of fossil fuels dedicated to the transport of commodities and food to and from processors, exporters, distributors, restaurants, retailers, even consumers. You begin to realize how deeply weve deluded ourselves into believing that we are terribly efficient and clever, having reduced agriculture to almost a statistical anomaly. However, the key point is that about 97 percent of Canadians have little or no contact with, or experience of, growing their own food. (Actually, that may be higher, as few direct farmers grow anything for themselves anymore. For the absurdity of this predicament, read E.F. Schumachers chapter The Proper Use of Land in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, and Wendell Berrys chapter The Economics of Subsistence in The Gift of Good Land.)
And why is this a danger? Well, few people know anything about how their food arrives in their mouths anymore, and have forgotten the precarious nature of the whole enterprise. It relies on fertile soil and topsoil, a humble thing no one but a serious, intelligent farmer gives any thought to. Which is frightening, as weve seen a pattern repeated disastrously over human history. Ill summarize:
A History of Agriculture
- Agricultural surpluses give rise to cities and taxes.
- Cities and taxes grow to levels that strip the fertility and topsoil of the surrounding lands.
- Soil fertility and topsoil are exhausted, and the civilization ends.
- Repeat, though in a different place and time.
Its hard to find accurate statistics on topsoil depletion in North America, but we only have a few inches left, having squandered almost all of it in ruinous agricultural practices. Soil health has been both worsened and masked by vast dosings of chemical fertilizers and sprays, though that game is about up now, too.
There are three major threats poised to crush agriculture and cultureas we know it: oil; soil fertility and topsoil; and ownership.
Oil
Modern farming is a huge piglet on the petroleum sow. Exactly how much is again not directly calculated. Back in 1981 the oil industry as embodied by Mobil Oil Corporation bragged that it took a U.S. gallon of gasoline to produce a bushel of corn. When you add on diesel costs for transporting produce to processors and markets (writer James Kunstler uses the brilliant term the 3,000-mile Caesar salad to describe the absurdity of our food system), and then the great quantities of natural gas required in the manufacture of artificial fertilizers and chemicals needed for the ever-increasing use of pesticides (crop loss from pests has gone from single to double digits now, even with these applications)well, its not good.
Primarily the crisis lies in oil prices that are only going to become numbingly high for whatever reason. It may be the peak oil theory (that were now on the declining side of total oil production), though that is spiritedly disputed by all sorts of interested parties. It could just be simple corporate greed in keeping oil off the market coupled with growing, insatiable demand around the world. However, oil production numbers are definitely declining nowdemand has never been higher, and prices must only continue to rise.
Without vast oceans of cheap oil, modern agriculture will falter and seize up. Weve been so conditioned to ridiculously cheap food in North America, the rapid price rises and almost instantaneous disappearance of some foods (that 3,000-mile Caesar salad) are going to be stunning. Weve literally been devouring oil.
Systematically, because it has been so cheap since the end of World War II, oil has replaced the free solar energy that farming historically has used: solar energy captured in plants and consumed by people and livestock (not photovoltaic solar cells). It was a great, psychotic ride while it lasted. Cheap oil allowed all of us to have the equivalent of a dozen or more servants or domestic help, and live like the most pampered of nobles. It also allowed the rape and pillage of the most humble but important source of our civilization.
Soil fertility and topsoil
Back to the dirt on dirt again.
Without chemical props, the disastrous state of our soil is going to be unarguable. It is estimated that 200 years ago most of North American cropland had at least 21 inches of topsoil; today the same regions have about six inches remaining. (Responsible agriculture, with crop rotation, fallowing and proper composting, usually prevents or even reverses such losses; it has to, to be sustainable.) In Canadawhich exports about half of all the food it produceswere going to see yield declines that, if were lucky, might leave enough to feed ourselves. Forget exports. Its going to be especially hard for the heavily urbanized areas of Canada as the most productive farmland outside our largest cities has been paved over.
James Kunstlers book The Long Emergency eloquently outlines all this. He accurately proclaims that the infrastructure of suburbia was the greatest misallocation of resources in world history. In his book and other articles, Kunstler points out that a large number of people are going to have to return to agriculture to make up for the lack of large machines resulting from no oil and the necessity of producing food close to mouths once more. (My wife started the book, then had to jump right to the back to the chapter, Living in the Long Emergency.)
With the hidden frailty of our soil fertility, you might see why those aware of it are shaking their heads about the sudden rush to build ethanol plants (hello, Stephen Harper!). The most insightful thing Ive read about this came from a farmer Kunstler heard at a recent meeting of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture: The ethanol craze means that were going to burn up the Midwests last six inches of topsoil in our gas tanks. Which, I suppose, is the tragic ending. However, were also opting for the comic ending and willfully ignoring that the input consumption of oil for fertilizer, pesticides, diesel and gasoline are going to tower over the ethanol produced.
Ownership
In my last book I called myself a yeoman farmer rather than a peasant. Im definitely an agrarian or neo-agrarian more than anythingmaybe Jeffersonian in that I believe in the widest possible ownership of agricultural land divided into sensible, sustainable holdings. I also see some of the merits in the old Digger movement that in 1649 at Little Heath near Cobham, Surrey, whose adherents reclaimed stolen common land and worked it together in common. I believe a mix of both is the healthiest for society. You can go back through historyas agrarian writer Victor Davis Hanson has in Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization or his Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Ideal. Now, he might be on the other side of the Diggers question than I amas he would be on most political matters. But I think he has the same unease with the disappearance of small, independent farms, farmers and farm families.
In a 2002 essay marking the 25th year since the publication of his famed The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry wrote that Agrarians value land because somewhere back in the history of their consciousness is the memory of being landless. Most North Americans have lost that connection to landlessness and hunger. Duddy Kravitzs grandpa telling Duddy that a man without land is nothing would be only a curiosity to them, rather than twanging their personal and cultural fear.
Viable farmland is disappearing in ownership, both permanently, as the current generation of owners sell it for development, treating a non-renewable resource as a winning lottery ticket, and through concentration, as fewer and fewer owners gobble up what remains. There are whole books on the horrors and false economies of factory, absentee farming. I can see them in the daily landscape myself.
Agricultural land, even under private ownership, ultimately belongs to everyone, and has to be treated that way. The French system uses the SAFER (Socits damenagment foncier et detablissement rural), a private board ordered by the state to regulate agricultural land. It decides whether agricultural land should remain in agricultural use and will arrange to have another farmer purchase it. Of course, SAFER is derided as being raging communism, but then again, Ive watched as Toronto metastasized through a big chunk of southern Ontario, and thats a greater disaster.
I believe that small farms, widely held and populated, have a definite relationship to when our culture has been most vibrant, creative and humane. Small is beautiful. Schumacher also wrote that It is obvious that men organized in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomaniac governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry.
A case in point is small dairy farms in Ontario. After the Walkerton tragedy, the Harris Tories managed to demonize farmers, rather than accept the responsibility for their own deregulation and downsizing. The result was a new series of draconian and expensive laws that forced small family diary operations, with say 30 head and their lands hungering for proper manure composting and application, to sell out to larger operations. So now average dairy herd size has radically increased, along with the centralized manure systems (and the huge potential for even more catastrophic spills and contamination), while the workforce to properly compost and apply the waste has evaporated. You can find numerous similar examples in agriculture around North America (or North Carolinas pig industry).
So whats a real radical, culture-jamming, WTO-battle-scarred protester to do? Well, Id say get a small farm. Its simultaneously the most sane and yet threateningly effective direct action you could take.
Wallace Berry wrote about the outrage this kind of counterintuitive action can set ablaze:
I can only conclude that I have scratched the skin of a technological fundamentalism that, like other fundamentalisms, wishes to monopolize a whole society and, therefore, cannot tolerate the smallest difference of opinion. At the slightest hint of a threat to their complacency, they repeat, like a chorus of toads, the notes sounded by their leaders in industry. The past was gloomy, drudgery-ridden, servile, meaningless and slow. The present, thanks only to purchasable products, is meaningful, bright, lively, centralized and fast. The future, thanks only to more purchasable products, is going to be even better. Thus consumers become salesmen, and the world is made safer for corporations.
What can you do?
Your choices basically are:
- Live in a walkable city neighbourhood that can be supplied reliably from the rural hinterland (if any remains non-suburbanized) and keep your fingers crossed. A city with good rail transport internally and to the hinterland or other cities is best. A variation on this would be to stay put, and join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operation as a shareholder.
- Move to a good, walkable small city or townwhich likely will be more readily supplied from the immediate rural hinterland. Proximity to water or rail transport will improve the quality of life noticeably. Joining a CSA is also a good idea.
- Purchase a small farm. Learn to farm: mixed, subsistence, specialized, CSAthere are a number of options. We are now two or three generations removed from traditional family farming, but a few still know how to farm well and how things were effectively done before oil. Try to utilize this small knowledge base before it disappears; most rural communities have wise and generous farm people who will teach those willing to learn.
- Learn a skill. Learn four. Stonemasonry, bricklaying, cooperage, welding, masonry fireplaces, Rumford fireplaces, basket weaving, preserving, small electrics, metalsmithing, teamstering, hunting, fishing, building ice housesand just general scavenging. If you are in medical school, select general practiceyoull have your pick of communities to settle in.
Ive come to believe that contentment is something missing from our livesdriven as they are to hollow excess by advertising and an unreflective pace of life. And thats contentment and not self-satisfaction, or quiet smugness or stiff-necked superiority. Its a condition I see more of out here in the countryof making do, of patience and of both long-term planning and enjoying the moment. Not many distillations of this beat the one put down on parchment a few millennia ago: Better is a handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.
It is a shame that it will take the spectacular failure of our post-World War II experiment to remind us who we are. If you are able to, make that handful one of sustaining soil. While you can.
