In a couple of weeks, my wife and maybe me will be packing and delivering the last veg boxes ever to issue from Vallis Veg, the business partnership she and I established in 2008, and we will be closing the business down. It won’t, I hope, be the last time any produce is grown or sold on our site, as I’ll explain below. Indeed, we’re excited about the new projects on the site that running the market garden has held us back from developing. But it will be the last time we sell produce under present business arrangements. Ironically, the business is costing us too much, and it can’t continue in its existing form.
It’s ironic partly because a business isn’t supposed to exact costs upon its proprietors, but to deliver benefits. Sadly, that’s scarcely the case for all too many people working in the global food system. We’re very far from the most disadvantaged among them, but it applies to us too – and to many other growers in the UK, especially small-scale local ones oriented to organic or agroecological production. The reasons for this are structural and global, and will be familiar to anyone who knows much about the food system or regularly reads this blog. But I’ll say a little more about them in a moment.
It’s also ironic because I’ve heard there are some comments circulating on Twitter that criticise me for our labour practices at Vallis Veg. Apparently, they suggest something along the lines that I lead a life of leisured ease built on profits accrued from unfair exploitation of other people’s labour in our market garden. Now, anybody who thinks one can build a life of leisured ease based on the profits – however ill-gotten – from an acre or so of vegetables in modern Britain clearly has no clue about the workings of the food system. Certainly, our business bank account isn’t corroborating this tall tale.
I believe the tale’s originators are a pair of Marxist academics who’ve been beefing with me for a few years now. I think it’s fair to say we’re not big fans of one another. I blocked them on Twitter a while back (the only people where I’ve ever felt that need) and I’m not going to unblock and read what they’ve written. Still, the wider issues concerning food, land and labour are important, and in view of the present historical moment on our farm and in the world it seems opportune to discuss them. Hopefully, the below will dispel the untruths apparently circulating about me. But, y’know … whatever. People will think what they think, and haters are always gonna hate.
A brief history of Vallis Veg
Let’s start with the story of our little farm – something I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. I can hardly do it justice in a single essay, even one as long as this, but I’ll lay down a few markers.
Like many people of our age and background, my wife and I have been lucky beneficiaries of the housing market. Like rather fewer, we parlayed our good fortune into an agrarian lifestyle. Reading the runes on climate, food and energy futures, I gave up my well-paid job in academia and in 2003 we bought a parcel of semi-improved bare pastureland in northeast Somerset for some tens of thousands of pounds. In 2008, we started selling veg boxes from the small market garden we’d established on the site, trading as Vallis Veg, with me working full-time as the main grower, which I did for about five years.
I found it hard to establish a viable market garden from scratch, without a farming background, while living offsite and helping raise young kids. The work was rewarding to the spirit in many ways but in the end I got pretty burned out by it. Looking back, the problem was partly my own attitude. Having worked for the previous fifteen years or so in salaried, career-ladder type jobs, I imported something of the attitude that tends to go with them – that I was an important person who the world owed a living. One of the best learnings I’ve got from being a small business proprietor is that I’m not an important person and the world doesn’t owe me a living. The world made that pretty plain as soon as I got started in market gardening, but it’s a lesson I keep learning in new ways. It’s helped propel me down a political path of agrarian populism, civic republicanism and distributism (and of appreciating the parallels with much indigenous thinking) that contrast sharply with Marxism, market liberalism and other kinds of collective modernist politics. But more on that another time.
One clue to the difficulties I faced, if I hadn’t been too naïve to see it, is that almost nobody works in small-scale, local, agroecological market gardening in Britain and most other rich countries. There’s a reason for that. I’m not saying it’s impossible to make it work at some level. There are people who do. Usually, they have good farming skills, good business skills, good people skills, an appetite for relentless hard work, a passion for farming, not too many other distractions in their lives and an easygoing attitude to earning a low income. It’s a rare combination, and I don’t possess enough of those qualities across the board. But even people better equipped than me often struggle to make it work.
Anyway, after five years as a grower, I stepped back from it. In recent years, I’ve helped out in the market garden occasionally and done some of the background work on the wider holding that helps support it – plumbing, machinery work, woodland management, general odd jobs and so on. Increasingly, I’ve got drawn into writing about human ecological futures and the role of farming within it (writing is another low-income sector. I seem to be drawn to them). This blog and subsequent writings basically emerged as an attempt to make sense of the experience.
As I stepped back from the market garden, my wife – who’s a better grower, businessperson and people person than me – stepped into it. We’d established a modest reputation in the local community as people who were trying to do something interesting and worthwhile on our land. The market garden, she rightly pointed out, was at the heart of them, and she went about trying to build out a community-oriented project from that – but always on the basis of our small private business partnership, largely because we found the bureaucratic inertia, grant dependence and organisational unwieldiness of larger social enterprises unappealing.
Instead, we’ve gone down the route of more local, ad hoc arrangements – for example, creating allotments for local people to grow food on our land, and hosting the excellent educational project Shared Earth Learning. My wife also set up a small campsite on our holding, with secluded pitches and firepits along the lines of the kind of campsites she’d always wanted to stay at. The campsite has been quite successful, albeit a bit less so now that more farmers are realising that if you’re going to farm live animals, humans are by far the best-paying livestock.
Such diversification schemes are ubiquitous in agriculture but, leaving them aside, most UK growers opt either to mechanize and grow on a larger scale (often attracting various explicit and implicit subsidies), or else to grow a handful of high-value crops intensively on a small scale, and typically purchasing the bulk of their inputs. Push the logic of those approaches and you get the basic twin structure of the wider UK horticulture industry. Either crops grown in the UK on Grade 1 land with arable-style techniques, usually with farm subsidies and the implicit subsidies of heavy mechanization and fossil fuel use. Or crops grown with a lot of human labour, which is an expensive input in the UK. So this latter route usually involves either importing crops from abroad where labour is cheaper, or importing the labour itself, typically in the form of temporary labourers from abroad.
Smaller scale agroecological growers essentially have to replicate or work their way around that structure as best they can. It’s worth looking at George Monbiot’s account of Iain Tolhurst’s operation in his Regenesis book, or at Ben Hartman’s The Lean Micro Farm – both justly celebrated growers – for a sense of how this works. Despite what I hope it’s not too unkind to call the Jean-Martin Fortier moment, the idea that even the best growers make much money from vegetable sales really doesn’t float. They might be able to afford a few staff (often part-time) on low wages, and maybe make the equivalent of something like minimum wage themselves if they’re lucky.
In my view, neither of these horticultural approaches is likely to persist long into the small farm future that awaits as a result of climate change, energy descent and a bunch of other drivers. But for numerous reasons I think it’s better to have small local farms trying to survive in the present economic climate and do what they can to make them resilient and pro-ecological than not to have them. For fifteen years, we’ve tried to square that circle as best we can at Vallis Veg, mostly by following the small-scale, labour-intensive route, but focused around a wide range of seasonal veg with more emphasis on learning and community-building than profits.
What emerged from those efforts as we tried to build a small farm community on our site was the development of another local, ad hoc arrangement – a two-year learning opportunity that we offered in small-scale agroecological horticulture. It’s quite a big step up from working as an apprentice or employee on an agroecological market garden to running one yourself as your own business, and it’s widely noted that there’s a dearth of skills training in the sector – on the business side of things as well as on the growing side. The Soil Association ran an apprentice scheme for a few years, but it came to an end because too few growers could afford the wage bill. The Land Workers’ Alliance has worked more informally with growers to try to develop best possible practices around training and apprenticeships, and we shared our ideas with them.
Our scheme involved giving aspiring growers the chance to get a feel for running their own market garden without taking on the full business and financial risks of establishing their own enterprise from scratch. In the first year, people would learn all aspects of the business by working part-time on them with some instruction from the second year people and from us. In the second year, they’d run the box scheme as if it were their own business, albeit taking major decisions in discussion with us. We changed the terms and benefits of the scheme over the years. Initially, we asked for a 24-hour week in the first year with a stipend of £100 per week plus free accommodation, services and other in-kind benefits. In the second year, the grower(s) received 90% of the net takings from the business, with similar in-kind benefits, the balance of 10% (about 5% of gross income) coming to us as rent – more on rent in a moment. So not a wage in the second year, but a large share of the business income that it was substantially the incumbent’s responsibility to generate. In this last year of operation, we asked for at least 24 hours of work input per week with a £70 stipend plus free accommodation, services and other in-kind benefits for people in the first year of the scheme.
A lot of market gardens offer some mix of income and in-kind benefits like this, though none to our knowledge exactly like our scheme. I’m pretty sure that the people on our scheme were better off financially than if they’d tried to pay market rates for local housing, energy and other services and food out of a 24 hour per week market wage.
The project was never about earning a lot of money (we wouldn’t have chosen the horticulture sector if that had been a key motivation). And so it’s proved. My wife and I have averaged a joint annual income of £5,500 from the market garden over the last ten years. This year, we will probably earn a joint income of £2,500-3,000 for at least six months of one full-time equivalent labour input on our part. My wife put a lot of work into developing the learning opportunity and into teaching and managing people. While not expecting to earn much money from it, we did want the project to wash its face without subsidies from elsewhere. But it’s proved unfeasible on various fronts, including the rewards to our own labour time, and ultimately the model hasn’t really worked. Hence, in part, the decision to close it down.
I could write a book about the ins and outs of the market garden over the last fifteen years, and the two-year learning scheme we’ve trialled in the last few of them. Maybe someday I will. For now, I’ll just say that some veg was grown, some lessons were learned, some fun was had, and some of the people who passed through the scheme went on to get jobs in the sector they may not otherwise have got. Ultimately, we couldn’t transcend the constraints of food system economics, and some of the assumptions around work, rent and reward in wider society. We tried to make something happen that seemed worthwhile. It didn’t work out, but I’m happy that we tried. I don’t expect or need anyone’s sympathy about its failure, but it was a genuine attempt to create something useful, which cost us rather than made us richer. I don’t accept there was anything venal or exploitative about it on our part.
Perhaps it’s worth wrangling with a few numbers around commercial vegetable growing in relation to this. Suppose somebody is employed in a market garden at £12/hour (that, incidentally, is the basic rate we pay for unskilled labour in the campsite business, which can afford to pay it). Let’s say that their employer’s overheads are 40%, and let’s also say that the employer spends 5 minutes out of each hour they work teaching them skills or managing them, also paying themselves £12/hour for this work. This means that just for the employer to break even, the employee needs to generate £17.80 of vegetable sales for each hour they work. Looking in the shops today, I found prices for lettuces (from Spain) of 75p per item and parsnips (from Lincolnshire) of £1.40/kg. Suppose you can earn half as much again for local agroecological produce. That would mean that in every 7-hour day they worked, a grower’s employee would need to produce and sell the equivalent of about 60kg of parsnips or about 110 lettuces if the employer is to get even zero financial benefit rather than a negative return from employing them.
That’s quite a tall order for a small agroecological enterprise without much mechanization. The skilled and hardworking East European migrant workers historically employed in the industry might pull it off. I’m not sure I or the other people working here did.
One way around this is to look to decommodify the enterprise and focus as much as possible around other benefits. In practice, every society worth the name involves a plethora of personal relationships, voluntary agreements and complex motivations (I’ve just returned, for example, from visiting a relative who’s been working in an unpaid voluntary position for the Government, with a view to building his skills and connections). At Vallis Veg, we wanted to build a good community around the site, and we’ve endlessly discussed, negotiated and tweaked arrangements accordingly. Initially, we charged allotment holders £1 per year per plot, and we offered people working here rent-free accommodation. But in so doing, we weren’t placing much value on our own work and time input into the site, and that made it easy for other people not to value it either. Lately, we’ve become a little more insistent on recognition of that input in the arrangements we make. I won’t go into all the details of that here, but I’d like to say something about the nature of rent, which pertains to it, and which I think is often misunderstood.
The question of rent
Rent comes in different forms. ‘Economic rent’ refers to situations when a good or service commands a higher price than a normal market one because it’s subject to monopoly control. Land is subject to economic rent, because it’s a limited good. Liquid capital isn’t intrinsically limited in the same way, at least in the short run, but tends to get monopolized for other reasons – not least its investment in land, pushing up prices. This kind of rent is unearned speculative gain. It’s what we used to buy our land, through no major input of labour on our part – a sad reality of land access in contemporary Britain. A lot of economic thinking suggests people should not be able to make a financial gain out of speculative economic rent, and I agree. My book A Small Farm Future was unreservedly critical of economic rent. I don’t think anybody should have to pay a landowner anything just because they own land.
Here’s a picture of me planting trees on our site circa 2004, back in the days when I had long hair (actually, the word ‘long’ is an unnecessary qualifier).
The grassy area you see behind me now features, among other things, a fruit orchard, mature shelterbelts, a house, a track, a water supply and drainage system, composting toilets, hot showers, electricity generating equipment, an array of useful electrical gizmos and a well-stocked woodshed. Every one of those things was planned, paid for, project managed and in many cases put in place directly by my wife and/or me.
Here’s a drone shot of the holding from a few years ago, which hopefully gives a sense of the changes we’ve made under our ownership as we’ve diversified the site from those typical of the surrounding landscape.
Now, if I charge rent to somebody who stays in my house, using the hot water, or the fridge, or the track, or … the list goes on … that I’ve provided, this would not be economic rent, but rent as a return to my labour, just as a wage I might pay to that person for working on the land would be a return to theirs. A lot of people don’t seem to understand this point, perhaps because modern property rents – the kind of thing you pay to your landlord for a flat in the city – are so dominated by economic rent. However, if you’re living in a dwelling I’ve built myself on my land and you’re working as a grower on it, there’s no reason to disregard my labour to produce the dwelling as against your labour to produce the vegetables.
Further, habitable dwellings require upkeep. The pipe starts leaking, the walls need repainting, the drains need clearing, the electricity supply needs fixing, whatever (there’s quite a lot more of this kind of work on an offgrid farmstead, where the remit of energy or water companies runs less than it does in town). If I have to call in a professional tradesperson working in the wider economy to do any such work, their bill will be a minimum of £50 per hour – that’s an extra 45 lettuces or 24kg of parsnips I’d need to produce on top of the break-even wageworker output to fund an hour’s work from the tradesperson, which will need to be charged out somehow against the income from the site. The unpromising economics of all this soon start stacking up.
Talking of drains, during the long days I spent installing our water systems I inadvertently sliced through old clay field drains a couple of times that then had to be repaired. Apparently, these drains were mostly installed by Napoleonic prisoners of war, presumably working in conditions of near slavery. Once we start counting the embodied labour in a landscape, it runs pretty deep – figuratively and sometimes literally.
Anyway, point is, if you accept the distinction between economic and ordinary rent (you may not … I’ll come to that), then leaving aside the ground (economic) rent of buying the bare land in the first place, there’s an awful lot of my own and my wife’s labour embodied in this place. I think it’s legitimate for us to charge some of that out to people using the things our labour has provided.
However, if we’d done that proportionately to our labour input, the rent would probably far exceed what anybody could realistically earn by growing and selling vegetables from the site. So we didn’t do that. All the same, I’d like to put it out there that my labour and my wife’s labour does not count for less than the labour of other people growing vegetables here.
Now, you could say we’re the fools for spending our time and money on ‘improvements’ whose cost can’t be covered by the returns from the activities they enable. That’s how normal market economics works, incentivising the most remunerative uses of a resource. By those lights, we should probably have set up a horse livery, or a dirt bike track or a paintball playground … or, indeed, a campsite. That’s why a survey of local landscapes will reveal more of such things than small-scale agroecological market gardens, and why it’s easier to earn money running a campsite than a market garden. (Actually, part of that ease has to do with economic rent – I think we’re more vulnerable to criticism about unfair practices on our site in relation to the campsite than the market garden, but nobody seems to mind the economic rent charged by the hospitality industry. Possibly this has to do with the fact that the entire UK and global economy and most of the jobs associated with it are propped up by economic rent, as I’ll discuss further in a moment. Those in glasshouses…)
The trouble is, you can’t eat the products of a horse livery or a campsite (well, I guess you can eat horses, but not if you want to stay in the livery business for long). In my opinion, normal market economics is incentivising the wrong things. I think its preference for horse liveries or campsites over vegetables and other local food production will lead us to disaster (you can make a similar argument around energy-intensive arable cropping).
Where does food come from?
Meanwhile, although the fields around our town provide severely limited types and quantities of food for local consumption, the local shops are crammed with every imaginable foodstuff from around the world, if you can afford to pay for it.
The way this works in the fossil-fuelled modern economy is that wherever in the world can be found the cheapest assemblage of land, labour, energy and capital to produce a given food commodity, that will be a preferential site of its production. And that is why the world has become ever more reliant on the vulnerable breadbaskets of the continental grassland regions for their grains, why poor farmers can’t afford to produce local staple crops but get drawn into growing commodity cash crops that put them at risk of hunger and greater poverty, why tropical forests are razed for soya, beef and palm oil, and why in rich countries like Britain where fossil energy is cheap and human labour is dear we overproduce arable grain crops and (whisper it) ruminant meat, and underproduce fruit and vegetables, which we import from Spain or further afield.
This also explains why it’s a lot easier to run a local campsite than a local market garden. Whereas food can be produced wherever in the world is suggested by the land-labour-energy-capital nexus and moved to the consumer, the same cannot be said of campsites, bed and breakfasts, pheasant shoots and fishing ponds. Farm diversification is the name of the game. Until people actually need food.
Given the perversity of market incentives, you could opt instead for a non-market system based on state ownership of all land – no private property, no private businesses or entrepreneurs. This still seems to be the preferred model for some people on the left. To my mind, it’s an ideal that’s never existed in practice, and it’s never panned out well when governments have tried to implement it. But that’s a discussion for another time. The more important point is that even with that model, you still have to find ways to appropriately apply finite reserves of land, energy, capital and labour to produce food and other necessities of life to be consumed. You don’t escape from the basic dilemmas of production and consumption simply by socialising or nationalising them.
My thinking, and hopefully our future practices on the farm, has gone in the other direction – not aggregating the means of production, as with the collectivist approaches of communism and corporate welfare capitalism, but distributing them. This doesn’t escape from the basic dilemmas of production and consumption either, but by bringing production and consumption into closer moral relationship with one another – often in the body of the same person – it makes them a bit less intractable.
More on distributism
Inasmuch as it’s true that I have the leisure to sit around writing books and essays like this, I’ve argued that it’s not because I’ve exploited the labour of people growing vegetables on our site. Nor do I make much money from writing. Our campsite makes a bit of money, but our household income is usually well below the national average.
So how do I fund my leisured, writerly existence? Largely by being my own landlord, and my own service provider. I pay no rent or mortgage, no energy bills in our off-grid house, and limited food bills because we produce a lot of our own food.
I’m lucky. This is an option open to few. But it could be open to many more via a distributist politics that altered the nature of property rights, and made land widely available. Granted, if most people were living like this, I’d have less time for writing. I think we’re moving rapidly towards a future of low energy localism in which the best option is for most people to live like this, in the sense of spending more of their time producing food, fibre and energy from local land over which they have household appropriation rights of some kind. There are worse options. For now, I use some of the free time available to me to make the case for this best option, and against worse ones.
Worse ones in my opinion are to follow modernist politics in its full Marxist or market liberal logic. Commodify everything, the argument goes, and good things will follow – either from economic growth and the division of labour or a revolutionary Marxist upheaval of the commodity form that will result in … well, it’s not quite clear. Nor is it clear to me how further ramifying waged employment and its quantified production of alienated commodities across every aspect of society will prepare the ground for its overthrow in favour of that better thing, whatever it is. This is a phantasm of Marxist dialectics that even Marx himself eventually abandoned.
A while back on this site, I quoted Alistair MacIntyre “When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy”. What MacIntyre proposes instead is “the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages that are already upon us” (After Virtue, pp.262-3). That’s pretty much where I’m at.
The magic money tree
Justifying her government’s economic policies, former British prime minister Theresa May notoriously said “there isn’t a magic money tree”. While her statement isn’t strictly true in the case of rich-country governments or private banks, which do have ways of magicking up more money, it is true of small farms. So while it may have been great to pay the people working on our farm, and ourselves, more money, that wasn’t really on the cards. We did our best to decommodify within reason, and offer other in-kind benefits.
Still, at a deeper level I’d concede there is a magic money tree underlying our ability to create food and other kinds of wellbeing on our holding within the inevitable confines of the modern economy. Histories of racialized capitalism, ecocidal extractivism, even the labours of Napoleonic prisoners, are enabling conditions for the relatively easy lives that everyone who’s lived and worked on our site have enjoyed.
The same, however, is true of almost every other kind of work and worker in contemporary Britain. One example is the emerging trend for people far richer than me to buy landholdings and employ well remunerated staff to curate the grounds, the walled vegetable gardens and so on in service of therapeutic retreats, high end restaurants and suchlike, far beyond the compass of any sustainable agrarian economy. Who wouldn’t opt for such well-paid work compared to the vicissitudes of running your own market garden business? Whether that work lights the path to a fairer and more sustainable future is another matter.
Another example is academia. The worker in the increasingly corporatized university – hugely well paid by global standards – with its pension schemes and its exorbitant fee schedules (shouldn’t the university be paying the student for their labour?) draws from the magic money tree of racialized capitalism and ecocidal extractivism as well, however radical their words, while teaching courses I suspect will often prove of questionable value in the world to come, except in the short-term scramble for graduate jobs that water the tree yet more. I’m glad I’m out of academia now and doing something more useful.
Something more useful. Next year, veg will still be produced and sold from our market garden by two young growers who are starting their own business on the existing market garden – but it will be their business, not ours. They have lots of ideas about what they want to do, and were drawn to our site because of its ready-to-go infrastructure and loyal customer list. Some people, at least, are able to recognise the virtues of embodied labour when they see it. I wish them every success.
For our part, we’ll still be growing food and wood for ourselves and the wider community, including new shared projects for producing staple vegetables and livestock with local people (no wages involved!) We’re looking forward to focusing more upon community self-reliance than commercial production. Hopefully, my wife will have more time to do the community mediation and restorative work that she’s pursued when she can in recent years. I think that kind of work is going to be ever more vital in the future. And hopefully Shared Earth Learning and the allotment group will carry on doing their things and the site will continue to produce food, fibre and local human connection.
I’m planning to feed in as best I can to all of that, and to continue to write … if there are still people interested in reading what I have to say. But for now, I’ve had my fill of aggressive men impugning my character online. Also, my mother has just died, and I feel the need to spend some time dealing with the practical and emotional consequences of that. So I’m going to take a break from writing and blogging until January, and may not engage much or at all in any discussions arising from this post.
It’s customary at this time of year for me to mention the payment button on this site, in case you’re minded to offer me a seasonal tip for providing all the content I’ve made freely available here. If you’re unpersuaded by my analysis above, maybe you’ll consider that a cheeky request. Whatever the case, thanks to regular readers and to commenters for your wonderful and stimulating conversations on this site over the last year. I hope to be back in the new year to finish off discussions of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, and onwards from there to topics new. Ciao.
