(I'll begin with a note of
acknowledgment that there has been a gap in my posts. Primarily this has been due to the need to actually transition life from one place to another. Moving a family is a full-time job. And then, in the midst of those logistics, we've been experiencing a global pandemic. What better time to be thinking about how our everyday choices can contribute to the health, or to the illness, of ourselves, our communities, and our planet...? Right?)
In my original manifesto I alluded to the centrality of monetary value in accounting for gains and losses in our current economy, and I merely noted that I don't accept this mode of evaluation as the only or primary measure. Probably a better summary would be to say that I scoffed at the need for money. But I'm not just taking a position of privilege, looking down at those who need to make money because I am comfortable with my financial situation. The time has come for me to clarify this point, because all of the feedback on my previous post involved raising financial issues.
In every case, I agreed with my commenters on the need to ask questions about cash flow, to make a viable business plan, to forecast costs, revenues and whatnot for the sake of solvency, etc. etc. What I couldn't see my way to was: 1) that these financial questions had to have good answers before I should undertake to start a sustainable farm; 2) that, in the abstract and before knowing future weather and future crop yields, I could have any way to know that a large farm would necessarily be better (financially?) than one of the size I'm planning. Nonetheless, I'm as certain as ever that small beginnings are the best match for someone who knows as little as I do about agriculture in general, and about this plot of land in particular.
But for now, it is worth asking: where does money fit into sustainable farming, as I see it? To get at this, I must first confront the rift that is revealed by the two issues mentioned above. The rift is this: first, for nearly everyone today, money is the means of making a living. 'Productivity' is an abstraction, and what is made by one's labor is made tangible via a paycheck (which itself is usually not a physical thing anymore).
Beyond that, and secondly, anyone with a college education in economics probably learned, or learned enough to assume, the idea that where there is demand and enough money, there will be a supply to meet it. Wealth can magically compel into its possession whatever a body could want. We aren't new-comers to this idea, of course. But we do seem to be sporting a novel arrogance in our blindness to the lesson of King Midas.
These two presuppositions demarcate the rift between my views on money and most people. And neither of these things are true in absolutely, or regardless of context. For one thing, money is strictly unnecessarily unless you lack the means to grow your own food, build your own shelter, and craft your own tools and clothing. Or better: if you can grow enough of your own, you can survive on it by yourself, and trade for whatever else you need. As for the idea that money solves the problem of supply by itself, that is certainly false in cases where the means of supplying something debilitates or destroys the sources of supply. And that's precisely how the dominant form of industrialized farming proceeds, by supplying necessary food to consumers while poisoning water tables and oceans, eroding fertile soil, and generally not gaining the farmer very much in monetary return, either.
This conclusion is worth pondering every day: you can’t eat money. The economy of financial gain will burn itself out and we will still need food. Every single person eating from nonsustainable agricultural is reducing the total carrying capacity for feeding someone else, or theirself, later.
So my first principle in agriculture is permanence. Anything I do must not detract from future fertility in any way. What if that isn’t profitable? Then, I must accept being impecunious. But I will never accept gaining a profit today by plundering tomorrow. And remember: a poor farmer is still a producer. I can still feed my basic needs without profit, unless I choose practices that incur costs regardless of what I reap/sow. Costs like expensive machinery and huge storage facilities.
Brother Wendell, ever laconic, has a good line on this topic of food vs. finance: “A farmer who eats from his land won’t soon starve. But he can be taxed into poisoning his own land.“
The introduction of monetary dependence and finance-only accounting practices is actually antithetical to sustainable farming. Money can be used--and has been so used very effectively in the twentieth century--to incentivize agrarian suicide. No one ultimately gains from these unsustainable practices, though agribusiness corporations and their stakeholders do amass windfall profits in the short term. Meanwhile, rather than collaborating for the health of their families and communities in order to sell abundant and necessary food and make a living doing it, the financial model of conventional industrial methods pits farmers against one another, driving the ludicrous overproduction of annual (as opposed to perennial) cash crops, and intentionally keeping prices low. So low that farmers sometimes cannot make enough money to cover their expensive inputs and also feed their own families.
(In a later post, I'll address the important issue related to this question of overproduction, namely, don't we need to be producing this many crops on this much land in order to feed the growing population of this planet? And won't sustainable practices require more land to feed the number of people we're currently feeding, thereby only exacerbating deforestation and related land abuses? I'm aware of these problems, and I'm going to just amble past them for the time being...)
Let me give a rough approximation of my view of money's ability to assess the true value of agriculture: It's about as good as the ability of a fighter jet pilot's ability to count the leaves on a tree as they blow past at Mach two. Money is tailor-made for evaluations that have to happen on the fly: quickly and without attention to detail. It is exquisitely suited for anonymous transactions: I trust money because I don't know the person who produced what I am buying, and I don't know whether they are a true master of the craft or a fraud. Likewise,
they don't know me, and anything I might offer them in exchange is similarly suspect, except for my money. The market's determination will have to make up for our mutual deficit of human community here. And money serves us well enough where the thing being evaluated is known to everyone to be made on the cheap, such that any error in value is bound to be vanishingly small anyway. The vast majority of things bought and sold with money are just such things: commodities. Where these are concerned, it matters little that money is the gossamer connecting producers and consumers.
But what we grow and eat is not treated as a commodity without costly errors in evaluation. If a farmer who works land conservingly and industriously cannot sell at a price to break even but another who plunders the land and pollutes the neighborhood can win short-term gains...is the losing farmer to blame? Or is it the corporations profiting from the system that wastes the fertility of the land, based on the ludicrous idea that this is the only way to produce enough (when we're actually producing way too much of a very few crops, which is why many farmers are so broke)?
By now it should be obvious, but I'll say it clear and plain: I don't intend to make money; that isn't my goal and I won't be a slave to it. I prefer to think of this venture as a way to avoid money. I plan to make beautiful, nutritious things. I plan to cultivate a place that brings pleasure to those who visit. I plan to make something that can't be evaluated in terms outside of being here and experiencing it fully. This is why it is paramount for my operation to reduce its dependency on purchased inputs to nearly zero. I don't know for sure if this will be possible, but that is my aim.
My proposed path to solvency looks like this:
Revenue: >$0
Costs: ~$0
Profits: >$0
That is the only honest way I can calculate, and I am willing to bet that it is a truer prediction of the future than what you find in many successful business pitches, because these numbers are actually dependent on things I can control.
With that as the starting point, the role of money becomes as pure intermediary. If the farm produces more than we need, then we sell the excess for (nearly) total profit (because we're keeping costs near zero). Those profits are then reinvested in the farm to increase productivity, until we're at full carrying capacity.