Wessex and Londinium – the Reckoning

I promised a bonfire of the numbers on my Peasant’s Republic of Wessex project in this post. Well, here goes. We shall also be taking a couple of side trips to the city state of Londinium – which, it turns out, is not without its peasant-like aspects – and to the Principality of Wales. So pour yourself a stiff one, pull up a pew, and get yourself some matches to help me light the flame.

First, though, a stop press from the Somerset County Council newsroom. What, you didn’t know Somerset County Council had a newsroom? Shame on you – I’ll have you know that Somerset’s a happenin’ place. And what’s happening, specifically, is that “Somerset County Council and partners across the South West have been working together to seek more power and budgets devolved from central government….in response to the Government’s interest in devolution from Westminster.” I bet those who said that the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex was an impossible dream are feeling a bit sheepish now, huh? Well, let’s have a look at what the County Council has in mind: “The detailed plan aims for higher productivity and better-paid jobs, improved road, rail and broadband links and more homes for the region’s growing population.” Oh.

Well, nobody said Rome was built in a day.

Anyway, back in the make believe world of the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex, I think I’ve shown in previous posts that a population comprising around 20% of predominantly self-supporting smallholders and around 80% non-farmers could feed its expanded population circa 2039 using organic farming methods, powering its agriculture with non-fossil energy – and, more questionably, possibly its society more generally, though only with deep cuts from current levels of usage. I suspect that the 20/80 split is unlikely in reality – I’d guess there would either be a larger or smaller proportion of smallholders depending on the likely future course of agriculture’s negative experience curve. Anyway, it’s a starting position for debate.

The assumptions I made in projecting future food productivity in Wessex were, I believe, quite conservative. I think it would be eminently possible to grow a lot more food by relaxing or otherwise changing some of those assumptions. I worked up a spreadsheet along those lines, which involved plugging in higher confidence limit rather than lower confidence limit productivity averages, and also ploughing up the region’s major arterial roadways and growing apples and potatoes on them instead – which is the kind of thing you can do when you’re the supreme leader of a regional republic, even if said republic is merely a figment of your imagination made manifest in Excel. But, as I recently mentioned, I’ve started becoming a little bored with my plaything – an occupational hazard among narcissistic dictators – so I can’t really be bothered to outline my ‘abundant Wessex’ projections in detail. Suffice to say that if you relax your assumptions about the possibilities for growing more food, then it’s possible to grow more food.

Conversely, I suppose I should also run some projections using yet more stringent assumptions. At the limit, the most stringent assumption is that we’re all screwed and there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it – except maybe listen to the earth died screaming on repeat play until a blessed insanity descends. But try putting that in an Excel spreadsheet… An alternative would be to project what our prime minister might call a ‘just about managing’ scenario – or what I, being a glass half-empty kind of guy, would be more inclined to call a ‘we’re all moderately screwed’ scenario. On that score, perhaps we could invoke a recent paper projecting that the impact of climate change in the USA will reduce its agricultural yield to pre-1980 levels by 2050. I’m not sure if anyone’s done a similar analysis for the UK and if it would be sensible to assume similar yield declines. As I say, I’ve fallen a bit out of love with my spreadsheets of late, so I’m inclined just to say that here in Wessex we might be able to feed ourselves in the future very comfortably, quite comfortably, not very comfortably or not at all. There. I’m glad I crunched through all that data in order to push at such far frontiers of new knowledge. If you want me to quantify a ‘moderately screwed’ scenario, you’ll have to twist my arm. Hitting the ‘Donate’ button would help – the lucrative returns for writing this blog seem to have dried up of late. Maybe I’ve been arguing too much.

So, I plan to leave my Wessex peasants and non-peasants there for now. But of course in a world where there’s a Wessex, perhaps we need to ask what of Mercia, what of Northumberland, what, indeed, of Londinium? Well, for the aforementioned reasons I don’t plan on cranking out a whole series of spreadsheets for every UK region, but nor do I want you to leave this post entirely bereft of quantification, so here’s a table ranking seven English regions (I’ve amalgamated the East and Southeast regions, which basically constitute London’s agrarian hinterland) plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland according to available agricultural area per capita. I define ‘agricultural area’ as cropland plus temporary grass, and exclude from it permanent grass and rough grazing – quite a stringent assumption, because there’s a lot of permanent grass in the UK (about 65% of the total agricultural land take) and some of it would be suitable for cropping, though some of it most certainly wouldn’t be.

Table 1: Agricultural land per capita in the UK

Source: Derived from http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2016/06/5559/84

I guess you could say the table suggests I’ve been making it easy for myself in construing the agricultural sustainability of my particular region (the southwest), since this has pretty much the highest per capita farmland availability in the whole country. So let’s look at Londinium (aka the East and Southeast regions), which has pretty much the lowest.

The first observation to make is that if we devote 40% of Londinium’s farmland to 20% of its population for the purposes of homesteading, as we did in the case of Wessex, then there are going to be some seriously hungry folk in the smoke. Besides which, I’m figuring that this region will mostly house metropolitan types who couldn’t tell a Gloucester Old Spot from a Wiltshire Horn, and probably wouldn’t much care. I daresay there’d be a little homesteading going on around the margins, but I’m not counting on it – quite literally.

Likewise, we’re going to come up short if we try to grow all the food in the region organically, as a result of both lower organic yields and lower proportionate land areas after correcting for leys. Actually, organic farming does hit its targets for five of my six nutritional indicators (energy, protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Magnesium and Iron) in Londinium – the exception being the rather important one of energy, where it can only furnish about 60% of total calorific requirements. Not bad for a population of 27 million (again projected to be 20% higher than at present), but not quite good enough (once again, I acknowledge the claims for higher-productivity forms of alternative agriculture, and once again I’m going to sideline them – not because I’m necessarily sceptical, though with some such claims I am a bit, but more because of my preference for under-estimating on the basis of known parameters rather than over-estimating on the basis of unknown ones).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’ve modelled agrarian production for Londinium along fairly similar lines to the way I did it for the non-peasant folk in Wessex – growing cereals, potatoes and beans on the cropland (but using conventional methods) along with a 25% grass ley. I’ve given over more cropland to growing fruit and vegetables than is currently the case in Londinium in order to prevent any unfortunate outbreaks of scurvy, and I’m raising dairy and beef cows organically on the limited grassland available (there’s a much smaller proportion of permanent grass in Londinium than in Wessex), supplemented with cereal and legume fodder from the cropland. There’s also pork and eggs in the diet, grown essentially from the same sources, and the same ration of fish that was available to the Wessexers. As with Wessex, I’m (controversially) growing grass silage to make methane in order to fuel the food production and distribution system. But I’ve left out of account the energy required to make the synthetic fertiliser – assuming about 150kg Nha^-1 and a total energy production cost of 40 MJkgN^-1, this amounts to the equivalent of about seven or eight litres of diesel per person per year (not that you’d use diesel to do it). Make of all that what you will – I’m steering clear of any more wrangling over energy futures for the time being.

For information, Figure 1 below shows the overall land use in Londinium and Wessex, comparing present reality to the projected reality of the self-sufficient futures I’m construing in the two cases.

Figure 1: Wessex and Londinium – Present and Projected Land Use

We now come to the all-important question of whether Londinium can feed itself on the basis of the assumptions outlined above. And the answer is – yes. Next question. Oh, all right – I’ll show you some figures. Table 2 shows, as in my previous such exercises, the ratio of production and requirement for my six nutritional indicators produced in Londinium’s agrarian hinterlands on the basis of the assumptions outlined above (the figures for Wessex shown in previous posts are included for comparison).

Table 2: Production/requirement ratios

So, on the basis of the assumptions outlined here and elsewhere, the neo-peasants of Wessex and their non-peasant counterparts, together with their metropolitan cousins in the neighbouring republic of Londinium all get an adequate diet – though the metropolitan one comes at a higher energetic cost. However, their respective diets aren’t identical. This is indicated in Table 3, which shows the weekly allocation of foods of different kinds to an individual in each of the three cases.

Table 3: Regional diets (kg per person per week)

The three main food groups are (1) the starchy staples, (2) fruit and veg, (3) meat and dairy. Meat and dairy is the most land-hungry form of production in terms of nutritional output for hectares of input, although in all three cases the strategy I’ve adopted is largely a ‘default’ one of fitting livestock production around the edges of producing vegetable matter for direct human consumption, rather than producing livestock in competition with direct production. That’s the case, at any rate, if we assume that the breakdown of cropland and grassland shown in Figure 1 is taken as a given, since you can’t really produce food from grass without the intermediary of livestock. But the crop/grass balance is an arguable assumption – really, this is a moveable feast, and you could turn over some of the grassland to cropland, or else do other things with it such as grow fruit. A couple of points to bear in mind in relation to that vegan argument, though. First, where we’re growing organically, we need generous grass/clover leys, which are conducive to ruminant grazing. And second, I think we need to have some oil and fat in the diet, which in this climate we can only really get from livestock – unless we grow oilseed rape, which I’ve avoided doing in these models.

Notwithstanding those points, there’s a certain convertibility between the three main food groups described above. We can choose to grow fodder crops for ourselves or for livestock, and we can choose to devote cropland to starchy staples or to fruit and veg. The diets of the Wessex neo-peasants and the metropolitans of Londinium are quite divergent in this respect – the neo-peasants get a lot of meat and dairy in their diet (well, actually not that much compared to current levels of US or EU consumption, but as much as they can feasibly produce). Their 10 litres of milk per week also sounds like a lot, but not when you convert it into butter for fat, or into cheese. Likewise, they have a lot of vegetables in their diet, and not much in the way of starchy staples. The Londoners, on the other hand, get little meat or dairy (fat is a problem here) and a lot of starchy staples.

Effectively (and a touch ironically) I think the diets of Wessex and Londinium tend towards what I’d call the two extremes of the ‘peasant way’. The Wessex diet represents the peasant way of abundance, the kind of thing you can do if you have access to adequate land and a light coercive touch from the state. I think I’d possibly be tempted to grow a few more starchy staples and a bit less veg, but essentially this diet strikes me as nutritionally and agriculturally optimal. The garden and the pasture predominate over the field – a good way to eat and a good way to farm. The peasant way of abundance is far from the norm in peasant societies historically, though it’s been more common than those who like dismiss peasant lifeways as a tale of utter misery are usually prepared to admit.

The Londinium diet, on the other hand, represents the peasant way of stress, which is probably closer to the historical norm. The stress factor historically has usually been one or both of: (1) a predatory state, which extracts as much surplus from peasant cultivators as it can get away with, or (2) a Malthusian crisis, in which population outstrips the productive capacity of the land in relation to current technical levels of production (though sometimes an apparently Malthusian crisis is a manifestation of a predatory state, which controls the availability of land). In such circumstances, cultivators necessarily adopt the strategy of producing as much macronutrient-dense food as possible for the minimum input of land and labour – which usually pushes them towards the starchy staples. In the case of Londinium, we have an unprecedentedly dense population, which has resulted from the geopolitics of a globalised and industrialised modern world not at all geared to local food production. Feeding it adequately from local resources is, arguably, doable – but only by pushing pretty hard towards a Malthusian limit. At the moment, such megacities don’t need to provision themselves locally. They typically rely on grain from the continental grasslands and labour-intensive luxuries from the labour-rich, money-poor economic periphery. In the long term, those tactics probably aren’t sustainable – not least because of the outlook for the continental grasslands alluded to in the paper cited above, and also in this excellent piece, another Small Farm Future trailblazer. So perhaps in the future places like Londinium will be reduced to scraping for their supper like any average hard-pressed peasantry.

But another way of looking at it would be that Londinium is probably capable of providing its basic subsistence needs from its immediate hinterlands, which puts it at some food security advantage in these fractiously neo-mercantilist times. I imagine its fortunes will start to decline in the decades ahead, but it seems likely that they’ll stay healthier than those in most of the rest of the UK, which might enable it to do what cities do best and pull in the productivity of less prosperous far-flung lands. Imagine all those beady metropolitan eyes, tired of their bread and gruel, fixed upon the pastures of Wessex where the milk and honey flows. Well, I have a few ideas about how to cope with that which I’ll outline in a future post, but I can’t deny it’s a sobering thought. So perhaps in the meantime we Wessexers should sharpen our pitchforks and summon the Duke of Monmouth’s spirit to our cause.

Well, I’m pretty much inclined to leave my quantitative analysis of Wessex and Londinium there, at least for the time being, though it’s a shame to end on such a conflictual note. There’s a certain London food activist, whose work I greatly admire, who may just possibly be reading this. If she is, and has ideas for brokering a peace between Wessex and Londinium, I’d be delighted to hear from her.

Finally, and talking of Monmouth as I just was, let’s take a short trip across the Bristol Channel and pay a brief visit to Wales. As shown in Table 1, Wales has among the lowest ratios of cropland to population in the UK. On the other hand, it has among the highest ratios of permanent grass (including rough grazing) to population – at 0.49ha per capita it comes second only to Scotland’s whopping 0.88ha, with the highest English region being, you guessed it, Wessex, at a trifling 0.18ha. Recently, I was looking at George Monbiot’s critique of upland sheep farming, in which he has Wales very much in his sights. So I thought I’d look at Welsh food self-sufficiency on the basis of its current agriculture, which on the face of it seems to have a lop-sided focus on low productivity sheep. I’ve taken a figure for sheep meat produced in Welsh abattoirs – which I imagine greatly underestimates the potential productivity of the Welsh sheep industry. I’ve added a rough figure for beef, but ignored dairy on the grounds that it probably relies considerably on imported concentrates. Then I’ve added in all the cropland productivity. And the result of all that is that in calorific terms, Wales could be 61% self-sufficient. Bearing in mind that it’s probably a considerable underestimate, I think that’s an intriguing figure. You could interpret it as supportive of George’s position, or of Simon Fairlie’s view reported on my relevant blog post that there are too many sheep in Wales. Certainly, if you wanted full self-sufficiency for Wales you’d need to find a bit more cropland and probably practice more mixed ley farming as perhaps used to be the case before Wales turned to a more monocultural ovine export agriculture. But given the much-derided low productivity of upland sheep farming, my feeling is that a focus on upland pastoralism may not be such a bad way to go as a key part of a self-provisioning strategy in a relatively unpopulous and mountainous country.

Postscript

I’m providing some additional figures in response to John Boxall’s comment below:

Teaser photo credit: By Stephencdickson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35518283