Bonus Episode 47 PREVIEW: Farming

Right.

So, yeah, I want to talk about farming.

I've sprinkled in actually a couple of mini actual engineering disasters, you know, your problems.

So, you know, bonus listeners won't feel left out when I'm just like chattering about farm income and bullshit like that.

But before we get to all that,

I do want to do a little bit of, you know, self-criticism.

I think it's important, you know, Maoists as we may or may not be.

So next slide, please.

Well, no, well,

my dad is.

I am not.

In reference to the previous episode, because I saw there was some controversy about that, this is a German man.

You will not convince me otherwise.

You show me the long-form birth certificate, and until I've seen the proof, this is a German man.

Shut the fuck up.

Next slide, please.

So why am I here?

Apart from that, I want to talk about farming.

So over the Christmas break, my partner went to see her family for a few days, and I was left with nothing better to do.

So I watched all three seasons of Clarkson's farm available on Amazon don't watch it it's actually actively bad for you it's a terrible terrible show

my main problem with the worst show in the world

I mean it's history's greatest monster so you know second greatest monster so it's it's not quite quite the same as the other shows that are terrible but the main thing that's my problem with it is especially in season one he does get a few things right about modern farming within a British context but also in a a more sort of western context but um it is essentially an entertainment product and he is jeremy clarkson is a terrible fucking human being who you know this is a bonus right and it's recorded in the us so i can say whatever the fuck i like right yeah where i was in the u.s

he did buy the farm he did buy the farm purely for like tax avoidance reasons yes yes he did he yeah he ex he admitted it at the time He literally said it in print in the paper.

We can't be action for it.

Yeah.

He admitted at the time, oh yeah, I bought it as a tax dodge.

And And now, you know, when there were farm protests going on about inheritance tax in the UK, he said, no, actually, I'm a really real farmer.

It's like, no, you're not.

You're just a guy who wants to

give a bunch of wealth in the form of land to his children.

And, you know, now he pretends that he's an actual farmer.

The real problem with farming, with modern farming in general, is like basically it is a system that is designed to ignore two basic things.

All natural systems, like water, biodiversity,

the climate, all that stuff, as well as a sort of production system that is stuck in the 1950s and refuses to evolve for

many reasons that we'll get into during the course of this episode.

Next slide, please.

I will say, in Clarkson's defense, at least in the American context,

land speculation is like 50% of the farming business.

Oh, it's a huge

business.

We'll get there.

Yeah.

Well, it's a huge thing everywhere, for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's a

you can be a farmer and just do land speculation.

Let's be, let's be real.

Most of them do.

I just want to re-emphasize that point that Rob made there.

Yeah, it's very much like we are, it's because it's true for absolutely so many things.

We have 1950s capitalist production system that just assumes the planet will just be like this infinitely without any downsides.

And that includes things like the availability, as Rob said, the availability of things like water and soil nutrients and general biodiversity and the absolutely critical invertebrate fauna that keep soil alive.

My dad is a land use ecologist, so I will be.

Yes, I actually have thoughts on this.

This has come through nutrition and all of his life has done research into this stuff.

So yes, I might share a few things, although I will shut up mostly.

We'll be fine if we just send out a few more boats and discover some new continents, you know, probably be on the ice wall.

I'll be on the ice wall.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, obviously, dude, do you want to get the expedition ready or is that my job

well you talk about this but but like china has done china's doing this they're they're they've they've gone to they're already going to um to eastern africa and for example they're all over Madagascar, like plugging it with like peanuts and just like destroying, like, just like just like two seasons and you're out type situation where it's obliterating thousands of square kilometers of

beautiful Bayab terrain for the benefit of peanut growth.

Because China's doing that.

They're doing the kind of the capitalist

sort of colonial expansion thing of Chinese.

It is colonial extraction.

So the other reason,

the most likely more serious reason, next slide, please, that I wanted to talk about this

is this shit.

This was last year, end of last year in the UK.

There was a whole bunch of farmer protests all over Europe last year and the year before, and I think the year before that, they pretty much happened like clockwork.

and every time on I see the worst people in the world talking about the same thing

which essentially

the right-wing the fash are gearing up to make farming and farmers specifically a blood and soil issue you know it's very it's a very emotive subject it's you know you want pretty back British farming back French farming you know small farms are important da-di-da whether they are or not I'm kind of agnostic about that but like a lot of right-wing people place a lot of stock on farming in particular because it is it has has that like i said it's literal blood and soil shit it's it's you know it's a it's a national security issue um it has that and my one of my main problems with it is is like liberals have no answer for this crisis because they created it and liberals never have an answer for anything and leftists i think in general don't think nearly enough about food production we tend to think about industrial production unions that kind of stuff which is all very cool but we tend to ignore the bit you know, that says where the food comes from because every time somebody on sort of our side of the fence talks about where the food food comes from, then everybody starts yelling about collective farming and

things of that nature.

And then it all gets pretty messy.

So, this is why I want to, the other reason why I want to talk about this is because

a couple of years ago during the Brexit debate, a very similar thing happened to the UK fishing industry.

All of a sudden, they were national champions.

They were very important.

And then the second, the people who wanted Brexit got what they wanted.

The fishing industry got dumped over the side, pardon the pun, and then um you know were were immediately sold out in the post-brexit trade deal and were just kind of forgotten about and i think farming is really important i think farming is interesting as well so like it is i i have a point to note which is a couple of things number one if you're a farmer who can afford that tractor you are not likely to be uh running a small farm because that is an extremely expensive bit of kit yeah the same they have the same issue in the United States.

I think that should kind of be obvious.

But yeah, we have the, this is, I think the myth of the sort of down-home farmer, which is you know, yes, it's all massive agribusinesses and shit.

And

what's the really big one, Roz?

The privately owned one, car

a cargo, cargo,

probably, yeah, yeah.

I mean, cargo's more of a trader and less of a farmer, but it's a distinct we'll get into it.

But there are slides about cargo coming up later for people who like their agri-trading things.

My second point on this is: if as a if you've got time to go to London in your tractor,

again,

my grandfather, still farming in his 80th year,

how?

Again, big farm because he does not have time to do that.

He could go on holiday for two weeks every now and then, but he does not have time to do that.

And certainly didn't when he was running the farm in its totality because he did mixed arable and cattle.

He had no time to do stuff like that.

Yes, it does seem like whenever there's one of these big, highly publicized protests where they roll the tractors into like London or Paris and then they spray manure on something.

It's like it's only like huge farmers protesting whatever the latest EU sustainability regulation is.

The key thing is, this is not like this is emphasizing Rob's point is that this is getting hijacked by a certain set and a certain class of people and of farmer.

But just to emphasize Rob's point, so many

farmers are who have lots of challenges.

We're kind of having those challenges challenges sort of either amplified, but for the wrong reasons, or ignored by some of this sort of

money-based stuff that we saw in these recent arguments.

And yes, yeah, Rob, yes, yes.

Yeah, so

essentially, and I also think like a lot of farmers in the UK, in Europe, and also in America have very legitimate reasons to be incredibly pissed about how they have been treated in the last, I don't know, 20, 30, maybe 40 years.

Like, they have legitimate complaints.

In this specific case, when it comes to paying inheritance tax on your farm, that's not one of them.

Shut the fuck up.

Like,

that is not one of them.

Anyway, so that's sort of the table setting.

One more thing.

Next slide, please.

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.

Oh, we're going to have to do it.

Wow, I've worked for once.

Wow.

We're doing it.

We're doing it.

Yeah, we will have to slap a seizure warning on that.

In all seriousness,

I will say, when I put this together, this looked a lot less violent than I can see that it is now.

It looks like a pool of boiling blood with the words words in general.

Rob, this is what you've manifested.

Okay.

So this is the big in general warning because I'm going to say a whole bunch of things which are generally overall statistically

mostly true.

But because farming is incredibly unique and every farm is genuinely different, the soil aspect, what you grow, how you grow, what your market is, is so different.

I cannot speak to every farm.

Everything I say, somebody's going to be able to say, well, or Gareth will be able to say, My grandfather's farm doesn't work this way, and it's very different, and you don't know what you're talking about.

My statements, I think, overall are in general true.

That there's an immense variability that, like, if we talked about individual farms, we would literally be recording until the end of recorded time.

And you know, we can't quite make it like that, mainly because I like to go to bed at some point.

Um, nope, nope, you are the bomb callers tightening Rob.

You are, you are a hostage indefinitely.

Sorry, buddy.

All right,

Good to know.

The other in general is like, I will mainly be talking about European, Western European, and American farming about which I know the most.

I know that leaves out like most of the planet.

I'm well aware of it.

But the thing is, I don't know shit about farm systems in Southeast Asia or what China's doing or like most of

sub-Saharan Africa.

So I won't talk about it because I simply don't know.

Like, that's the only way

I can talk about it.

The third in general thing is I'm mainly going to be talking about arable farming, those things that grow.

I'm going to try to talk about cows less because, again, I have to put some restrictions on this already too big a topic.

And again, it's not something that

I don't know enough about to speak with full confidence in.

So, you know, that's those are that's the seizure warning and that's the in-general warning

in advance.

All right, so let's get started with the very tiniest of history lessons.

Next slide, please.

I just wanted to, sorry, Rob.

Sorry.

I just wanted to chip in to kind of support that point.

In the UK, there are like around about 60,000 farm businesses around about

only a third of them are like small, like two-thirds of them are either like medium or large or extremely large.

So just to give an idea of scale, like hopefully that shows how diverse

the map is just in the UK, which is a tiny, stupid fucking little island.

Yeah, I mean,

and then, like, even then, like, what the UK would consider a large to very large farm is like a small one in the Great Plains.

So, like,

you know, you're it's very difficult to be sort of broad about this, but I'm going to do my best.

Anyway, very briefly,

without doing the entire history of agriculture and you all together, a lot of the history of humanity and what we've done,

you know, since we stopped doing hunter-gathering is sitting down in one place and then having increasingly fewer people needed to work the land so most people could go out and do other things, you know, like do podcasts and other

important work.

Apart from that, you know, that's the general evolution.

It's also a general point.

We don't do that anymore because farm work by hand sucks fucking ass.

Like you may have like romantic visions of like, oh, but I have like 12 tomato plants in my backyard and I really like picking them.

It sounds so romantic.

It's like, yeah, it's really good fun.

But most like commercial horticulture things have like 100,000 tomatoes and you have to pick it up.

Wait until you're

walking four and a half miles to pick all the tomatoes and bent over the whole time.

Yes, yes.

There's a reason, we'll talk about farm labor in a little bit, but there's a reason why, you know, that's that is a job when, like, when

like societies reach a certain level of economic sophistication and the income grows high enough, there's a reason that you get very, very few people who still want to pick the strawberries, slice the asparagus, do all that stuff.

There's a very good reason for that, and why, you know, the people who still do that in Europe, in America, are among the most

are usually illegal and usually exploited because there's a reason we don't do that shit anymore ourselves.

And even putting migrant labor labor labor labor.

That doesn't make it good, mine.

No, it doesn't make you good.

Even putting migrant labor to one side, there's a reason why, like, child labor, by which I mean your kids, are still doing a huge amount of farm work.

Because if you didn't use your kids,

the child labor, to do a lot of the farm stuff, like hoiking bales around if you're an arable farmer and stuff,

the business wouldn't work.

The numbers wouldn't work.

You wouldn't be able to make the thing work.

I also want to talk about this guy's nipple.

I also noticed that.

It is enormous.

And I think we need to just address this.

Mommy milkers, and that's okay.

Absolutely.

I have bamboobs.

I have bamboobs.

Specifically, the nipple, though, it's extremely

an imposing presence on this.

Like gum drops on the farm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I also wanted to correct something from earlier.

In early agriculture, podcasts would have been called oral tradition.

That's true.

How do you think we got Torah, man?

Return with a V.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Torah.

That's the first podcast.

The first podcast.

Yeah, that's it.

First podcast transcript.

Anyway,

in the West, I have to, I'll say that a few more times just in case, we have, historically speaking, been living in a madly unprecedented period of history, which is food abundance.

Food abundance is

one of the most uncommon things you will ever find in recorded history.

We have been living in a sort of world novelty of the last three, maybe four generations now, where food is abundant, it's available, it's cheap, it's safe, and it is simply there.

You can go to any fucking gas station, supermarket, you know, wherever, wherever you go, there's like food available for very little money.

A bit more money now than like five years ago, but you know, in general, it's it's no,

he's gonna

lower the price of eggs, bro.

You won't get it, bro.

Why does it cost so much to order a taxi for my burrito then?

Because your gig economy, oh,

not even as a joke.

It's because the economies of having the guy get on the tractor from Gareth's farm and drive the burrito to your house.

It's just like, you know, you have to ship the things, you have to get it

to Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia.

It's the good quality stuff.

Philadelphia is in Pennsylvania, Rob.

You were right.

Yeah.

Anyway,

one more caveat.

I will keep doing these.

I know there are food deserts, especially in urban environments where there are no supermarkets.

There's like quarter stores or berengas if you live in New York City, which I hear are filled with cats.

Cats are cool.

But like in general, overall,

it is

next time you go to the supermarket, like, especially in that, like, the fruit and veg and the bakery aisles, just like sort of take a second to

genuinely marvel at the modern miracle that there is that much food year-round available for you to purchase at relatively low prices.

It is like, you know,

that line about how you would have killed a medieval peasant with a Dorito, it's that, but like, you would have shown them the fucking produce aisle in Kroger's, like, they're you would have been mopping brains up off the floor for hours after that.

Oh, yeah.

You know, you could, you can buy an avocado in January, and they're like, they don't even know what that is.

Rob's, how do you say that word, bud?

Avocado.

That's okay.

An avocado.

Yeah.

I was wondering if you were asking about that or noting that Rob said Kroger's instead of Kroger.

Yeah,

Rob gets a pass because he lives.

I was trying to be localized.

No, no, that's that's actually that is a localized version because a lot of people, even though it's called Kroger, they call it Kroger's.

Yeah.

Like why Tesco's calling it giants.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And

oh no, Wegman's is Wegman's is with an S, actually.

So yeah.

Yeah.

Look, now that Nova has canonically died in

the Glasgow storms, it's, you know, all I'm sensing is, you know, there may be an opportunity coming up.

Oh, no, there's a problem.

And I thought, you know, if I sounded more like a native.

Yeah, it's um,

what's really great is that

that food abundance is going to continue at infinitum for our society.

And there's no major kind of oncoming threat to that.

I'm really glad about that.

Cue the last slide.

Again, you've just got to discover a couple more continents beyond the ice wall.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you know, there may be some delicious food out there.

You know, I mean, there is every chance that as the, you know, the tundras melt in the polar ice cap retreats that, you know, Greenland could become like like an actual farming hub.

So

there's hope, at least, for America, I suppose.

I'm just imagining how much current agricultural land would become desert at that point.

Well, we'll get there.

That's towards the end.

That's the scary thing.

Oh, no.

I mean, obviously, that's never going to happen, of course.

I'm just making some random stuff up.

That's junk.

You have to argue that.

you know, global warming.

Oh, we'll just move north.

Well, all the lands there.

All the land there is shit.

So the Canadian Shield is not so good for you.

yeah yeah

the other i wouldn't necessarily say it's like it's a problem it's more like sort of an evolution is that we don't just have like more people overall on the planet than we ever have before but specifically we have more and more middle class people

china india brazil you know other places the demand for food especially different foods at high standards is projected to increase for the next 40 years if not more you know depending on how the income gets distributed in the next 50 years but like overall, there will be more people with more disposable income who don't want like just the food they grow locally.

They want, you know, avocados in January.

They want

truffle in my microwaveable macaroni cheese.

Terrifying future where, you know,

Indian people become middle class and they start replacing all the delicious food with like wonder bread and boiled chicken breasts.

Yeah, like all the vadapows get converted into just to get rid of vadapows and just become burgers.

No,

my God.

Don't do that.

My God.

We have to avoid this future.

So the other thing, which is also because now we live in a period of super abundance, so that is next slide, please.

That is, it's not necessarily, it didn't start with her.

I know environment, the environment and conservationism is much older, Theodore Roosevelt, the National Parks, et cetera, et cetera.

But one of the things that we do now that we have at least much more conversations about and that people like recognize more overall is that like farmers aren't just farmers anymore we ask them or we demand of them that they grow not just food but they protect the environment they do good stuff water they do good stuff for for the soil they have a duty of care and forced subsidized or otherwise but like

we have reached the point of our understanding that if we don't look after the underlying ecosystems that you know make farming possible clean air um clean water uh good soil all that stuff will get into it there is no farming and there is no future and the whole thing gets very fucked but essentially like this in in certainly in terms of farming this is new like the the first real environmental regulations on

like

the pillar the pill two which is the common agricultural policies like that comes from the

mid 80s maybe 1990s that's europe i know america is different how like america doesn't really do like that kind of protection it's kind of do you

I was going to say, it's kind of certain, because yeah, it's absolutely new, and certainly the regulatory terms, absolutely new.

but in a way it's rediscovering how we did farming originally which was much more subsistence based and and and probably and actually as a lot of indigenous populations around the planet understand that actually you trash the land that you rely on for food and that then you have no food and so so in a way as we've discovered you know again Thanks, Dad, for all the research you do and your colleagues do on this.

As we've discovered, like you do the trashing of the land, your business ends.

You have no farm.

I mean, are you please do it for one second?

I hate to cut in.

Actually, no, I don't.

Fuck you.

But Nova's coming.

Oh, bro.

Good.

We are not starting over.

She's just going to have to join.

It's just going to join and it'll be fine.

It's a bonus.

The hogs love

us for being real.

It's fine.

Yeah, so I was just

reinforcing that point, but it's interesting.

It's almost like

regulation is kind of forcing farmers to rediscover something that we as a species knew just

1500 years ago.

I have a certain amount of, I mean, mean, I think that's valid.

I have a certain amount of skepticism about rediscovering the wisdom of the ancients with regards to farming because a lot of it is not fish.

Yes.

There's a certain extent to which, okay, we could go back to like, you know, the more sustainable agriculture.

Well, the aquifer underneath the Midwest is still going to get drained.

Well, we'll, you know, spoilers for later slides, but we will be talking about the Midwest aquifer.

Oh, God.

Oh, no.

Oh, God.