Context:
The Great Unraveling
We are entering The Great Unraveling (sensu Post Carbon Institute). A time of political, economic, and environmental upheaval, as a series of crises reinforce one another, and the complex systems of globalization start to fail.
For example, food systems are stressed by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is causing higher costs for fertilizer, fuel, shipping, and plastics used for packaging. We may expect in the near future, as job losses in the overall economy reduce household incomes, that the effects of high food prices will be compounded, causing hunger, immiseration, and political strife -- a combination which lowers the odds of competent governance responding wisely to our predicament.
As The Great Unraveling progresses over coming decades, its impacts may be felt most severely in highly urbanized societies where few people have the connections and skills to simplify their lives and meet basic needs directly from the land. Furthermore, the high degree of mechanization in food economies decreases their ability to adapt gracefully to limits. In short, a system evolved to reduce costly labor following decades of cheap and reliable energy supplies becomes unworkable when industrial processes are curtailed by high costs and shortages of energy and materials.
The farming club is a new model for people to relate to farmland and their food. Instead of going to a grocery store, or paying someone to grow food for them in a CSA, people work together to grow their food under the guidance of an experienced farmer.
Club members save money on food, develop useful skills, build community, gain access to nature, get regular exercise, and eat healthy diets. Farmers become valued for their expertise, socially connected, earn income, and farm and steward land with non-professional labor. Nearly all of the inputs built into the industrial food system, from urea fertilizers to refrigerated trucking to plastic packaging, are bypassed.
Alik Pelman, an assistant professor, trained for a year to become skilled at farming, and now works under 100 hours annually to grow a complete diet. Skilled human labor is very energy efficient; it is just not (at least in so-called advanced economies) financially efficient. We are not promoting exploitative labor practices demanded by a market economy. Instead, people will grow food for themselves, and in this context the labor becomes mostly enjoyable and not burdensome.
The Victory Garden movements that characterized 20th-century wartime showed how quickly an industrializing population could advance the goals of local production and self-reliance. However, 80 to 100 years ago it was not a big ask for people to grow their own food. Nations were less urbanized, city dwellers often had connections to family members in the countryside, and food systems were organized regionally and only partially industrialized. Today the situation is more difficult, as farms predominantly grow a few global commodities, more and more people have left the countryside to live in cities, and the vast majority of urbanites have left behind food-growing skills and become completely reliant on shipping and shopping to acquire food.
Response: Farming Clubs
Resilience:
The Next System Evolution
Globally, governments have largely failed to build resilience in the face of cascading environmental and social crises, leaving communities to do their own work to navigate the Great Unraveling.
Successful communities will understand that true resilience is not about bouncing back to the status quo. It is about adapting to new realities while maintaining core functions. For example, in the context of food systems, having sufficient, nutritious food is the core function. Following the principles of resilience science requires an inquiry into how we can adapt the food system and still provide this core function as environmental and social conditions rapidly evolve.
Sustainable food systems need to provide more calories than they consume during production and distribution (reversing the current 10 expended to one provided). They also need soil-conserving processes in which the minerals extracted by harvests get returned and soil health is maintained (versus current widespread soil erosion and degradation). Modern food systems have only persisted for decades because mining, oil and gas industries have sold cheap inputs to mitigate ecological ruin. Expected new conditions include: R reduced external inputs, shorter supply chains, a faltering formal economy, and a surplus of underutilized and locally available human labor. We now must find ways to economize on energy, lower external inputs, and rediscover how to apply our own labor effectively to yield food and secure soil health.