Guest Post by Charles Hugh Smith
October 19, 2019
This is only a partial list of what we’ve lost to globalism, cheap credit and the Tyranny of Price which generates the Landfill Economy.
A documentary on the decline of small farms and the rural economy in France highlights what we’ve lost in the decades-long rush to globalize and financialize everything on the planet— what we call Neoliberalism, the ideology of turning everything into a global market controlled by The Tyranny of Price and cheap credit issued to corporations and banks by central banks.
After Winter, Spring (2012) was made by an American who moved to a small village in the Dordogne region of France to recover something of her childhood on a small Pennsylvania farm.
The farmers–self-described as paysans, peasants in English, (a translation I don’t consider entirely accurate, for reasons too complex to go into here)– describe the financial difficulties of earning enough to survive without outside jobs.
One young farmer who is taking over the family dairy from his aging parents encapsulates the economic reality of small farms: in the 1960s, they had 3 or 4 cows, now they have 100, but their income is the same.
Corporate mega-farms can produce huge quantities of agricultural products of questionable quality because they have the scale, access to cheap credit and expertise to deal with the voluminous bureaucratic paperwork imposed by the EU and the French government. (One slip-up on a form and you’re sunk if you’re a one- or two-person operation.)
Artisanal producers can’t compete, and will never be able to compete in a global marketplace where there is always a cheaper source. (Up to half a small farmer’s income comes from EU subsidies, which the EU is trying to cut.)
Financial survival requires one spouse have an outside job, or the farmers must operate farm tours, an onsite auberge (restaurant) or equivalent higher-margin business, all of which increases the capital they must borrow to fund the expansion and the risk of bankruptcy should the venture fail to cover its costs.
The documentary echoes the themes of an earlier French documentary, Profils Paysans, a three-part series of which only the third film Modern Life (2008) has English Subtitles.
The financial uncertainties and endless hard work are running up against generational realities: relatively few young people have the necessary passion for farming and the appetite for risk and hard work. Across the developed world, from Japan to the U.S. to France, there are few (if any) successors in line to take over the small family farms.
The small family farm–and the knowledge of how to grow food and raise animals–is dying away with the passing of our elderly farmers. The average age of farmers in many nations is well above 60. Many of the paysans (male and female) profiled in these documentaries are in their 80s.
The land is sold for residential development (i.e. exurb sprawl, overwhelming infrastructure such as roads, water systems, etc. designed for much small populations) or abandoned.
These documentaries only partially capture the enormous distance between “modern life” and the human-Nature relationship required to make land sustainably productive.
It’s important to preserve wilderness, but we don’t eat what grows or roams in wilderness. Wildlife can’t survive solely on isolated preserves, either; Corporate Big Ag monoculture fields offer little to no habitat for wildlife.
Corporate Big Ag doesn’t maintain the polycultures needed to support insects, birds and other wildlife; small farms provide niches and habitats for all sorts of life that doesn’t serve a direct financial interest of the owners.
The widening divide between the modern lifestyle–completely ignorant and dismissive of rural productive polyculture–and those who still hold knowledge of artisanal, small-scale, localized production of high quality food–is already unbridgeable.
One elderly farmer described how his non-French neighbor complained about the cowbells on his few cattle. This resident’s dogs could bark freely, but the cowbells were an annoyance beyond tolerance?
This is a manifestation of the complete alienation of “modern life” from the production of food. The modern urban/exurb resident doesn’t want to smell hay (hay fever!) or manure (oh my, all animal poop should vanish instantly or I can’t bear it) or any other exposure to the realities of raising livestock, killing animals so we can eat them or any other reality of food. All of these processes should be done thousands of miles away, and the food shipped by air in nice plastic containers to our supermarkets.
Neoliberal economists insist nothing has been lost; the plastic food in the plastic containers is “market efficiency” (never mind the dependence on cheap credit and cheap jet fuel). As for all the intangible economic, social and cultural capital that’s been lost–it has no value in globalized Neoliberal economies.
One almost hopes that Corporate Big Ag disappears due to mono-crop plagues and people start going hungry to the point that they begin to take an interest in relearning all that’s been cavalierly tossed away in favor of plastic food in plastic packaging and endless hours slumped on sofas “consuming” videos and “engaging” social media.
We’ve lost so much in the conquest of localized, small-scale polycultural farming by Neoliberal globalism and the dominance of cheap-credit-fueled Corporate Big Ag, yet we’re only dimly aware of what’s been lost because it isn’t measured or valued in Neoliberal economies.
We’ve lost the knowledge of even partial self-sufficiency; we’ve lost a diversified local economy that can feed itself; we’ve lost “food security,” the resilience provided by food grown locally rather than being flown in from thousands of miles away; we’ve lost the cultural habits of helping neighbors bring in their harvest, of celebrating the shared work around a communal table; we’ve lost any Nature-based cultural identity; we’ve lost the cultural and economic capital of interwoven small farms; we’ve lost the habitats for wildlife that are unique to polyculture farming, and we’ve lost any meaningful connection to the land and Nature.
It’s not just small farms that are being lost–it’s the entire rural economy of villages and towns that are supported by farm income and products.
This is only a partial list of what we’ve lost to globalism, cheap credit and the Tyranny of Price which generates the Landfill Economy: always buy the cheapest corporate product– price is all that matters, even if the quality is appalling. Just throw the low-quality items and food in the Landfill and buy new stuff on credit.)
These documentaries link directly to a 1,180 page two-volume work by historian Fernand Braudel, his last work:
The Identity of France: Volume One: History and Environment
The Identity of France: Volume Two: People and Production
I realize relatively few other readers would tackle a 1,200 page series with the same relish I have, or feel the same regret that I’ve finished the books, for my understanding of France, the history of agriculture, modern capitalism and prosperous rural economies is immeasurably richer.
What we’ve lost is a localized, resilient, diverse rural economy with a wealth of cultural and practical skills and wisdom. We only have a few years to save this immense wealth from complete and irretrievable loss.
What we’ve lost, whether we measure it or not is the subject my new book, Will You Be Richer or Poorer? Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World; (Read the first section for free (PDF). The book explores all the forms of wealth that we’ve lost or squandered. This applies not just to rural life and the rural, localized economy, but to our urban life, our society, our culture and our economy.
What is the correct answer about what $$ leads to?
Corruption? Incompetence? Waste?
Evil, slavery…the 4 horsemen.
Sadly there are only two ways to allocate goods and services. You can let market prices decide or the government can ration. Rationing invariably leads to shortages as we have seen in every commie or socialist country. Prices tend to produce abundance in commodities but competitive pressures result in the corporate farming of bland less healthy items. There is a market for artisanal products but it is much smaller and requires a superior product. Eg a certain maple syrup from you know who. To have the best conditions for artisanal products the government should leave them entirely alone. No regulation no inspection and of course no taxes for anybody. That is more of the EUs problem. They killed their own producers with red tape raising the costs!
Thank you
I hope to be on-site next year!
I stopped reading CHS some time back, but I’m glad t see him appear here. This essay is the best I’ve seen of his.
I have what I guess is called a “hobby farm”, or perhaps “farmlette”, because we’re talking about three acres. I have 90 fruit trees, plus a vegetable patch and a greenhouse. No animals, not even chickens, although we may try that again. I’ve been trying to get breeding snails, but it’s next to impossible where I live and the gov ag agency offers no help. What is described above makes me despair for the USA and all of us everywhere. It’s perhaps one of the globe’s great tragedies, because it’s spreading. Monoculture is horribly destructive, but it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for debt “money” and all the crimes against humanity it permits. One thinks about how snakes should be killed (the head) and how that might best be applied to the financial cabal and their vassals in politics, etc.
I admire those on here who are struggling to make a go of farming and wish them my best, but I fear for their futures if they don’t have other income sources. Even in my remote corner of the globe, an area with a mild climate, wonderful rich soil, much subterranean water, I’m one of the very few here who makes any effort to grow food. Why bother when the gov gives handouts and one can go to the shop and buy packaged garbage? All the old jam factories are closed, one pays a premium for decent veggies, ever harder to come by… Chhet, mon, I’m getting depressed!
Why did you stop reading CHS?
Mainly because I cut way back on internet use. More often than not I agree with much of what he’s written, so it wasn’t due to content or style. Truth told, I guess I decided he didn’t have much “new” to say to me, so I let him go along with quite a number of others. I prefer reading him here, as is the case with Zman, JHK and PCR. Nowadays, it’s down to American Digest, David Warren, Unz, Woodpile and of course TBP.
Sometimes I think that the cutback was to fight growing anger and despair. Long ago I used to write for Lew Rockwell, then as a paid columnist for a fortnightly, but I gave that up as well. Now I derive great pleasure from my three little grandchildren, puttering with my little “farmlette” and communicating with old friends scattered around the world. I also read a lot of books and contemplate my navel. I’m 73, so I find my thoughts turning more toward the hereafter than a world of which I’ve grown weary.
Corporate Big Ag doesn’t maintain the polycultures needed to support insects, birds and other wildlife; small farms provide niches and habitats for all sorts of life that doesn’t serve a direct financial interest of the owners.
Insightful and glad to hear someone understands why I agri-engineer the way I do. The barren cedar glade I started with is now host to a red-tailed hawk couple, all manner of snakes to feed on all manner of rodents, bees that naturally habitate in my Monarda fistulosa and Monarda didyma, and Lord knows what else living in the blackberry and black locust brambles acting as a living fence. The only creatures I find unwelcome are the deer who are uber destructive without apex predation. There was nothing in the field other than a rock shelf, an elm, two cedars, and a hackberry when I started. Nothing else could grow in these conditions.
God is truly good and it is humbling to watch all of the inner machinations of nature dance as one.
AOC (damn, that is one unfortunate set of initials you got there. I would definitely change my name if I were you) – you say ” all manner of snakes to feed on all manner of rodents”.
I have all kinds of wildlife on my property. Birds of a great many kinds, bees, goannas, kangaroos, possums (OZ type of course), plus eagles, hawks, owls, etc. plus the introduced pests of foxes and rabbits, which we are trying to eradicate. It is duckling season now, and we have ducklings by the dozen.
But one thing we will NOT do is encourage snakes. Oz snakes are not your run of the mill US type snakes. No sir. Not even rattlers, cotton mouths, etc., can hold a candle to the snakes of Oz. Oz snakes are the real fucking deal, and I shit you not. Our land is roamed by the brown snake – the second most deadly snake on earth, behind Oz’s taipan – and the red-bellied black (also one of the most deadly on earth (but generally docile, and no reported fatalities from black snakes). The brown snake is not to be screwed with, and it is responsible for half the fatalities from snake bite in Oz.
Oz snakes are protected by law. You are not allowed to gong them with a shovel. That said, every person I know in the area gongs them as soon as they are spotted. I understand that is the prime way of getting bit – seems they do not appreciate people attempting to whack them with shovels. But the bastards are so damn deadly, and they are earth colored, that no one wants to take the chance of stepping on one by accident. So folks have gotten pretty good with shovels.
God bless you, sir. I was thinking about you a couple of weekends ago talking to my now inherited Apache “relative” (by marriage, through my BIL’s wife 🙂 ). Boy did I learn a shitload from her, oh man! I talked with her and her husband for most of the reception. She was explaining how they maintain balance in Texas. What a pain. I’m going to be visiting their ranch and vice versa within the next couple of years. She is interested in some of the methods I’m using as well as the Junaluska apples we’re growing.
I am very jealous of your owls. I have been thinking about putting up some owl boxes but they’d have to be hung on the trees. It’d take heavy machinery to sink a stake deep enough for them in this limestone. We have a couple of foxes who sleep in our front yard and THUS FAR have not caused us any problems. We don’t have free range chickens yet though.
I have heard about your fierce snakes. I heard it’s reasonably docile but if you get bitten, you’re dead. The worst I’ve seen on my property is copperhead…not too bad at all. I do encourage the snakes, much to my wife’s chagrin. Using hugelkultur pretty much guarantees it whether I want them or not. They keep the rodents away from my trees whenever the daffodils and garlic don’t do the trick.
Occasional Cortex can change her name, I’m not changing mine. 🙂 The AoC were here long before that Marxist trash’s ilk set foot in the Colonies.
We love to grow stuff. I have around 100 square yards of raised beds that I built. They are around 3 feet high, 4 feet wide, 8 feet long. It makes them very easy to maintain. We top them up with compost each season. Each one is irrigated. Our soil is very poor, and the raised bed system is the way to go – plus it is very productive. We have some very large dams for our water supply. The biggest is around 25 million litres – or around 7.5 million gallons. It covers around 2 acres I suppose.
We have a fruit orchard, that is only fairly new. Apples, plums, pears, cherries, etc. I set that up in a valley where the soil is good, close to one of the dams, so we can get water to the trees. We also have citrus in raised beds, which are incredibly productive.
We grow some heirloom onions. These are clumping onions, that have just about died out as they are unable to be commercially harvested. we grow walking onions and potato onions and shallots of a couple different types. They are smaller than commercial onions, but are tasty, and can be easily reproduced year after year. We save a few bulbs and plant hem out – each bulb generates 6 to 10 new bulbs. The tops are useful similar to spring onions. We also plant a range of garlic – fresh garlic is so fragrant and tasty.
We have a fence covered with passion fruit. Thy do not like frost, but are a very tasty snack.
I grow superhot peppers each year. I may cut back on the quantity this year – I have trouble getting through the sauce I make – it is so damn hot a little dab will do you.
I am about to put in the spring planting – we tend to wait until the end of October or early November. We plant all the usual suspects – lettuce, cukes, tomatoes, zukes, pumpkins, squash, beans, etc etc. We get far more produce than we can use.
With respect to time needed to accomplish this, I suspect we spend maybe thirty hours a year. The raised beds are extremely efficient, and easy to use. It takes about 1/2 a day to clear the beds by 2 seasons (spring and fall)= 8 hours, about the same to add compost, turn the beds over, and plant out twice, and then another couple days equivalent harvesting, weeding, etc.
And for 30 hours work, we get almost 100% of our vegetables. I addition to the fresh veg, we also get 100% of our tomato sauce needs, which we freeze. The pumpkin, onion, garlic last very well, etc.
It is not very hard to do. And almost anyone with a yard could free up 50 or 100 square yards for raised beds – and then LITERALLY harvest tons of produce for only around 1/2 of work per week.
BTW – The owls are cool. When one swoops by in the dark, as they fly silent, they can give you quite a startle. We also love watching the eagles. We have lots in the area, and we have one very tall dead tree where a pair perches at dusk quite often. We sit out with a drink and admire them as they watch for their opportunity. We saw a hawk take a duck just the other day. It came down like a bullet and grabbed a duck. Happened in the blink of an eye.
One of my red-tailed hawks scared the shit out of us one afternoon at dinnertime. We were in the dining room and we have tall double windows on the side facing the back hill. My son said he saw the hawk dive out of nowhere at a squirrel, lift it up and drop it. Broke the squirrel’s back because it tried to run for about a few feet and then…nothing. It rolled all the dang way down the hill onto the blacktop. Definitely a teaching moment for the kids.
I wish I had tracked the progress of our little paradise over the years. When I get everything planted, I’ll get my son to post a YT of it all and kinda walk people through it all and what it took to build it.
You’re correct about raised beds. It’s easier on the back, it gives you more “control” over a confined area and it’s easier to experiment with. Mistakes are a lot more forgiving. The very first hugelkultur bed I did was about a 12′ x 20′ or so blueberry bed. What little soil we have is heavy clay on limestone. So when they cleared our front yard, I took all of the big logs (probably 5 cords or so?) and buried them in a perlite/peat/compost/pine bark mulch mix. Then I planted 8 highbushes on top of it with Red Chief strawberries as undergrowth. Normally I wouldn’t recommend planting directly on the ever-degrading logs, but blueberry roots are about 10″ deep.
The cool thing is that everyone was saying you could never get lavender to grow in highly acidic blueberry soil. Funny thing that. God has a different opinion apparently, because I have 2 Anouk Spanish lavenders thriving in the same bed.
I read somewhere, Oz has 6 of the 10 deadliest snakes in the world. I don’t envy you in that regard. No siree.
Go to about the 40 minute mark and watch his interaction with the fierce snake. I watched this when it first aired.
The fierce snake is also called the inland taipan. They are fast, strike multiple times, and can kill you in minutes. A couple telephone techs were walking through scrub, a few feet apart. One of them noticed the other had gone missing. He was struck by a taipan and dropped dead without making a sound. I hate snakes.
That fierce snake kissed him. He was nuts but damn I loved him.
Steve Irwin was always going to die doing this stuff. He was incredibly well loved but he messed with dangerous critters, and one of the least dangerous finally got him.
Yup, I think he knew it, too. His passion was to get people to think about nature and he didn’t appear to give a fuck how he went about teaching it, LOL.
One thing Steve Irwin had by the buckets…passion.
Something like 15 of the top 20 are found in Oz. The taipan and the eastern brown and the tiger are aggressive. Especially the taipan (the fierce snake).
Every critter in Oz is an Uber poisonous bastard even the platypus have a poison spike. Blue ring octopus the snakes the Sydney funnel spider and then the freaking sharks!!!! Then look out for the Yowie!
The hell with the Yowie – watch out for the Choctaw!
But you forgot the crocs, the damn birds (the cassowary and emu can both kill you it seems), the seashell that can kill you ( actually the critter that lives in it), the Roos can go apeshit, the goannas can cause real damage (one just put a lady in hospital), the damn dingoes, the rock fish, the fucking little jellyfish (irukanji or somesuch), the paralysis ticks, etc etc etc. Oz is from the damn Stone Age – everything here is dangerous.
The folks that live in the deep outback are about as resourceful as humans get. The US equivalent would be folks in remote Alaska.
God damn LLPOH, get the hell out of there!!!!
I’m surprised you haven’t lost any of your dogs yet.
Holy crap! I didn’t cover half of it! Goannas are nasty, Dingo Ate My Baby! Cone snail most lethal toxin out there!
You are the apex predator.
We live in Southern Idaho, down the road is Simplot and in the town down the road in Filer is Bayer that took over Monsanto just recently. Surrounded are small to large farms. Yes, there is a lot of GMO, herbicides and pesticides around us. Even worse, the insects have strongly decreased and next is the birds because they have less to eat. The big handed AG industry is here but something else is happening. Organic farms are popping up all over the place. Some big some small. I am one with small organic Ag going in, fruit trees, blackberries, blueberries and herbs. It is compacted and am shielded from majority of other farms. We have laying chickens, meat chickens, pigs that we sell their wieners and goats for milk. My children know where food really comes from, no BS. My husband, the main provider has to work outside for now but people are sick and tired of being poisoned with tasteless food shipped thousands of mile away. As cost of transportation, fuel, and uncertain economics(the debt that will implode) local food and local commerce will come around. There will be no choice. Grow whatever you can wherever you can! It could save your life.
Yes yes yes! So excited to hear of more and more folks connecting with the Earth once more! I truly believe that the land and food are what will win the day for all of us in the near future. Race doesn’t matter…we all have to eat, we all are yearning for health and wellness, and we all as God’s creatures are tied to the land.
We MUST encourage these ties that bind and avoid getting divided over bullshit!
“Race doesn’t matter…”
Your post overall is wise and well put. But I take issue with the quoted assetion.
Collectively no race on Earth acknowledges, let alone cares enough to act upon, the ecological and agricultural principles that folks like you espouse, other than Whites. And those Whites who do are a precious minority.
How many African or American Negroes, Chinese, Filipinos, Peruvians, El Salvadoreans, Bangladishi, etc do you see actively involved in, or even interested in, controlling their exponential population growth, cleaning up their pollution, or just ceasing the trashing of their own natural environments.
If reverence for the natural world, compliance with her laws, and restoration of her ecosystems are to be part of our future, they will have to come from European man.
Race does matter, most especially ours. If the project to extinguished Whites succeeds, all life on Earth BTW will be the worse for it.
“We MUST encourage these ties that bind and avoid getting divided over bullshit!”
The current entities arrayed against us want us dead and gone. We did not ask for this. Trying to “avoid getting divided over bullshit” has only worsened our predicament and weakened us further.
For us to survive, to defend ourselves from said entities, and eventually to thrive in cooperation with natural law, separation from the current multi-cultural, multi-racial milieu is necessary. My 2 bits.
Don’t get me wrong, I do agree with you for the most part. But what I have seen over the past year or so has been extremely encouraging. I now have brown relatives who make me look centrist, and who are as interested in restoring liberty as I am. That can’t have been by happenstance. Perhaps the exception rather than the norm, but I have to look at the positives.
The Tower of Babel is of course not indicative of sustainable society. It will end. But maybe for those who pick up the pieces, we can try and pick out the good traits we see. Maybe Anglos serve as the teacher of Locke and individual property rights again. Maybe Cherokee natives teach us how to rediscover harmony with nature. Maybe Southern blacks reconnect us with God. The only way I ever see this happening is after a crash and burn though.
IMHO Electric Boogaloo is baked into the cake within the next 2-4 years. It’s all about Maslow. Until people are brought down his pyramid a couple of notches and have to worry about eating, we’ll remain divided. I’m hoping we won’t STAY divided at that time or we will be looking at another Dark Age.
AOC, I do not think diversity of color will ever work long term. In any long emergency, I believe “your race is your uniform” will be the code.
This site keeps me sane. Living among the insane in the suburbs of Seattle, wish I knew people like this in the meat world. FYIW, if any Seatteites among TBP want to hang out please connect. The great unraveling is about to happen…
Long Time Lurker,
Have you heard of the morning DJ personality named Bender? He and his wife had the morning show on Kiss 105 (?). He’s my brother in law.