Michael Perelman wrote:
> I am getting ready to leave town. So, let me just make a few brief notes about
> farming.
>
Michael, forgive me for being crassly obvious, but how are your urban archipelagoes of market-gardens going to compete with Monsanto-driven, feedlot type modern agribiz?We already have a lot of allotment and smallholding farming here BTW: a good friend of mine who is also the publisher of the other socialist publishing house apart from Verso, spends his free time digging vegetables in his allotment. The munispalities here have a long and creditable history of supplying half-acre size allotments to very many local citizens. But it all doesn't add up to a pinprick compared to agribis. That's OK because most of it is done for love and self-consumed. But how will you compete? Isn't the only decisive trend in the world today, the tumultuous decanting of hundreds of millions of landless peasants into the new megacities? Won't the next century be about the temperate North feeding the gobally-warmed/dessicated South, with the final disappearance of the US family farmer as a social couche alreayd a fact, and ag now a vertical, corporate business?
Mark
> 1. Marx had it right. Appropriate farming involves a greater degree of
> localization and integration with industry. Marx, along with a number of
> conservative writers at the time, realized that increasing agricultural
> production meant a scientific farming that was integrated into the urban
> world. Urban wastes would provide fertilizer while agriculture would provide
> raw materials.
>
> The USDA recently tried to allow urban wastes are part of organic agriculture.
> They might have been correct, except that our urban wastes are contaminated
> with god-awful pollutants.
>
> You can't have good agriculture until you treat farm workers as humans. You
> don't just give higher wages, but you have to provide them with the same
> amenities that urban dwellers enjoy. Locating farms close to cities can allow
> some of this to happen.
>
> We can increase food yields quite a bit with intercropping, more labor
> intensive practices ....
>
> People enjoy gardening but would dread a life as a farm worker. Once we can
> make agricultural work more attractive, agriculture can make great progress.
>
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 916-898-5321
> E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu