As impending climate calamity looms and we approach the limits of our industrial agriculture system, all sorts of food production interventions are percolating. Supposedly, they'll help pull us back from the brink of environmental destruction. From the rewilding of the earth to hedge fund-backed food simulacra start-ups, the production and consumption of food has never been more philosophically fraught. Chris Smaje wrote Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods as a direct response to George Monbiot's 2022 book, Regenesis, because he believes small-scale farms, not biotech food solutions, are key to our survival.
Evan Kleiman: You were a social scientist who worked in universities and research institutes but you made a pretty big pivot. What did you decide to do and why?
Chris Smaje: I switched to being a small-scale farmer. My wife and I bought a small acreage here in Somerset in the West of England about 20 years ago. For a lot of that time, we've done various different things on the holding, tried to build a diverse small local holding. But the main commercial thing we've done, food-wise, is running a small market garden, growing veg, which we sell to people locally in the small town that we live on the edge of. I moved into it for various reasons. But largely, in the late 90s, early noughties, the issues of climate change and energy futures and localism and biodiversity, and we felt that the food system was at the heart of that. We kind of wanted, naively maybe, to be walking the walk and participating in that.
Your book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future, was written in direct response to George Monbiot's book Regenesis. It's so unusual for someone to write such a direct response to another writer. What inspired that kind of passion in you?
Chris Smaje: George has been a very powerful, eloquent advocate for environmentally thoughtful approaches, including in the food and farming system. I think he's kind of slightly gone off piste with his recent food thinking. Some years back, I interacted very positively with him but I think he's gradually bought into this technocratic approach to the food system. I wrote a previous book, A Small Farm Future, where I was making the case for smaller scale, more local, more job-rich, low-energy, mixed farming as a way forward. As I talked to people about that at conferences and so on, people said, "Well, you know, the elephant in the room is George Monbiot's argument for manufactured food." So I locked horns a little bit with him around that online. Then the opportunity arose to write a response.
You're right, it is unusual to write a book so directly aimed at somebody else's book but as I say, he's been a very influential, one of the few radical environmental voices who's got a real media platform here in the UK, and, I guess, in the wider world, so I felt it was important. I think there are some problems with his analysis. People who don't necessarily know that much about the food and farming system, I think, are apt to follow his line on the basis of the reputation that he's rightly built up. I felt the need to put an alternative perspective out there and that was the genesis of the book.
Chris Smaje was a social scientist who worked in universities and research institutes before pivoting to farming. Photo by Cordelia Rowlatt.
Could you describe what eco-modernism is as it pertains to food production?
Chris Smaje: There are no hard and fast definitions of it but basically it has various key elements. One is an emphasis on decarbonizing the energy supply but maintaining energy provision at current levels of abundance and price so an emphasis on energy transition to nuclear power or to renewables. But [there's] very much a belief that we can continue having a high-energy civilization. The second thing is biotech, particularly in relation to food. In the early days, it was very much focused around GM and genetic engineering technologies but as with George's recent book, the focus recently has switched more to so-called "precision fermentation" or the synthesis of bacterial protein in manufacturing processes.
Then, there's a strong emphasis on urbanism. The argument is that we live on a predominantly urban planet nowadays, and that's kind of non-negotiable, that has to remain. The final plank of it, I suppose, is looking after nature, preserving biodiversity. The argument is generally that the best way of doing that is by people separating themselves off from nature, de-materializing our footprint, humans living in predominantly urban settings and [eating] manufactured food, high-tech food solutions and leaving as much of the rest of the world to the wild creatures.
George repudiates the label eco-modernist but all of those elements are fairly key to his work. The idea is that technological solutions to contemporary problems are going to drive us onwards.
You have a different ethos that you have labeled agrarian localism. Can you describe that to us?
Chris Smaje: It's basically a lack of faith in all of those elements of eco-modernism that I just described. Where does that take us? Most parts of the world have traditions of low-energy, input cycling, mixed farming that tends to combine elements of cropping, some livestock husbandry, woodland. So people are living lower energy, more local lives where they are producing more of their material needs locally. My argument is that whether we like it or not, these big, driving forces in the world today — climate change, energy futures, and a lot of geopolitics and economic drivers — are going to make a high-energy, globalized world and the globalized food systems that we have become accustomed to increasingly problematic. So I think people need to re-embrace localism and the possibilities of producing food locally. It's a huge and difficult transition but I think from where we are now, anything that we do next is going to be a huge and difficult transition. That, to my mind, is going to be the most plausible response that we can make to present crises.
To some extent, it's based on the observation that the modern food and farming system is enormously inefficient in its overproduction. Every part of the world is driven to produce what it can most advantageously sell into global markets. The driver is profit margins whereas if we're looking at local food production, it's a very different kind of driver. It's about meeting local needs, and that can be much more diverse, much healthier, much more economically beneficial. But there's no denying the transition, either way, is going to be huge from where we are now.
At a time when we see democracy under threat in many places around the world, what are some links that you make from this type of farming with small-holder democracy?
Chris Smaje: That's an interesting and complicated question. I do foresee problems with the eco-modernist approach, which is top-down, which is going to cede a lot of power to corporations and to governments that have control of the energy supply. We may not have time to get into it but there are big, big energy questions around the sort of manufactured food and the biotech approach. The alternative is to try and build more resilient local societies that are not subject to those kind of bigger global forces, which I think are going to leave a lot of people out in the cold.
There's going to be really big, hard geopolitics in the years to come between the major global powers and the major producers of energy. And I think it's really important that people don't just take for granted the fact that they can go down to the store and buy whatever foods they need in the way that we've been accustomed to worldwide in recent years. As climate, as energy, and as these geopolitical realities (which we're already seeing in terms of various global conflicts in the world today) begin to bite, that's just not an assumption that I think will be wise for people to make.
We've really got to bite the bullet, ourselves locally, and start building up local capacities. That has enormous political implications, which I'm hoping to explore in future writing. But that's where it starts — local politics of land, local politics of food, not assuming that there is a global commodity supply chain that is going to service our needs as consumers anymore.
Right now, on social media platforms like TikTok, for example, you can see a movement percolating of younger people buying or renting land and striving to build more local, self-sufficient lives. We would need this to happen at some scale and with success. How do you see this happening in a place as large, for example, as the US, which has so many rural communities that have been hollowed out by current economic practices and beholden to a type of farming that is seen as being more and more problematic?
Chris Smaje: There's an answer that one of the problems with my kind of approach is that it gets dismissed as being sort of romantic, wanting to turn the clock back. It's not really about that. It's about facing the energy and the geopolitical realities of the present world. But at the same time, as you rightly say, there's an enormous number of young people and not so young people who are drawn to an agrarian life and rural communities that, as you say, have been hollowed out by processes of urbanization and enclosure, which have not always been positive or uncoerced. We tell this story that everybody wants to leave the countryside and go to the city. But very often, that's as a result of direct or indirect coercion.
There are plenty of opportunities for people to do exactly as you say, to start rebuilding local capacity. But there are also problems, particularly the financialization of land ownership that often gets in the way, particularly in wealthy countries like the US or perhaps even more so in a country here like the UK, which is so heavily populated. So there are tough politics around access to land, which we've almost been avoiding in recent history by having this urban manufactured base to our activities. But my argument is that that's a kind of short-term period in history that we're beginning to see the end of. So we need to re-embrace that kind of movement, which is nascent at the moment. More and more young people are getting interested in food, local production and that's what we have to amplify.
"Saying No To A Farm-Free Future" was written in direct response to George Monbiot's book "Regenesis." Photo courtesy of Chelsea Green Publishing.
You have a chapter in your book about refiguring the UK idea of the commons, which is very different than anything we have here in the US. Here, we would think of it as a zoning issue, I guess. There, you have a tradition of areas of land that are held in commons. Is there a lot of political opposition to expanding those to the inclusion of farmland?
Chris Smaje: It's a very complex history here. There are commons, particularly in upland areas with livestock farming, but it's not a major feature of agriculture here in the same way, perhaps, as the US. We're mostly talking about privately owned farmland. My view really is the need to have smaller plots of land that are available for people, either commercially or non-commercially, to produce food and fiber locally. Is there opposition to that? There isn't necessarily opposition to the principle of it. I think it's partly just the nature of land prices. There's so much capital liquidity in the global economy, which in a wealthy, politically stable country like the UK, tends to inflate land values. Everybody wants land for one reason or another and that means most people can't get a look-in into the landmark.
I was lucky, generationally, in moving from the city to where we are here in the west country at a time when you could just about afford to do that. But it's pretty hard for anyone to establish themselves in agriculture now, particularly when the returns to agriculture, at all scales, are so low. So there's a very complex, interconnected set of economic issues around the price of land, the price of housing, the price of energy, the price of labor, the price of food. All these things are pretty out of whack in terms of the global food commodity system. It's hard to unpick that at a local level. But that's what I think we have to try [to do].
It will move, one way or another, whether we like it or not in response to these bigger trends. So my argument is we should try and move it as best we can, by design, so it doesn't happen in a more chaotic way, by default.
Ultimately, you're right to raise the question of the commons because it is about communities. I've written about the commons. I'm critical of certain aspects of the idea of the commons. But basically, we have to come together and rebuild our communities and rebuild our collective agreements around land use, who occupies the land and how we produce food on it.
We tend to think in extremes. Maintain the status quo with regard to industrial agriculture or dream of switching to agro ecology in a major way. Is there a realistic middle ground that still makes a difference and goes some way to solving problems?
Chris Smaje: There can be middle grounds. One part of my approach, I guess to many people it probably seems quite radical, but I think we need to think outside the box and be aware that a lot of the assumptions we've made about politics, climate and energy systems are not going to hold good in the future, so we do need to think radically. There may well be opportunities for middle ground solutions and it depends a lot on where you are.
One important point to make about the manufactured food agenda is that it's based on the idea of low-carbon electricity input to produce bacterial protein. If you're lucky enough to live somewhere where you have good sources of low-carbon electricity (a lot of this stuff has been pioneered in Scandinavia where they have a lot of hydro electricity), then perhaps it could be part of the mix. But it'll never be as easy to replace free, low-carbon sunlight as it is to generate electricity. It's always going to be more costly and less efficient to energize food through electricity. So we need to make the most of sunlight. Historically, sunlight is free and low-carbon but diffuse. That means that people historically have been diffuse and we've been able to concentrate ourselves in these huge, mega-urban concentrations because of fossil energy.
If you take the view, as I do, that we're not going to have energy at the levels of abundance and low price that we've had over the last hundred plus years, then we need to fundamentally rethink settlement patterns and land-use patterns. That's where the agrarian localist argument comes in. But that doesn't mean that we're going back to some notion of a completely rural, distributed past or that there aren't possibilities of incorporating higher energy or higher tech types of agriculture. Ultimately, it's about how we can feed ourselves well and look after the natural world. But what I think we do have to let go of is a lot of existing assumptions about energy, climate, settlement patterns and land use.