“The once lordly region, born in days when cotton was king and slaves built the kingdom, has become a blighted land of forgotten promise. It is, according to statistical measures and the people who struggle to improve life in the region, Alabama’s Third World [2]” Similar words could be written to describe many rural areas, scattered all across America – places abandoned by an extractive, exploitative system of industrial economic development.
Economics deals with the “allocation of scarce resources among competing uses.” In everyday terms, economics provides the most efficient way to “use things up” – regardless of whether the things being used are minerals, land, or people. Neoclassical economics has nothing to contribute regarding the renewal or regeneration of either human or natural resources. Industrial development, with its specialization, standardization, and consolidation of control, is the epitome of economic theory in action. Industrialization is the most efficient system ever devised for “using things up.” Unfortunately, the land and the people of rural Alabama, like people in many other rural places, have been pretty much “used up.”
The industrial revolution, which began with textile milling, brought both cotton plantations and African slaves to the South. It brought prosperity to the exploiters and poverty to the exploited. Industrial regionalization brought textile mills to the South, moved cotton to the West, drove sharecroppers north, and turned landowners into textile mill workers. Again, it brought prosperity to the exploiters and poverty to the exploited. Today, industrial globalization is moving both textile mills and cotton to China and other low-wage regions of the world, bringing prosperity to the exploiters, poverty to the exploited, and leaving the rural South pretty much “used up” and abandoned.
This isn’t just a story of cotton and the South. It’s the story of all agricultural commodities, of all farmers, and all factory workers, all across rural America. It’s just more obvious for cotton in the South because it has been going on longer.
The promise of more money lured workers into relying on factories for their livelihood and lured farmers into industrial approaches to farming. However, the inevitable consequences, for both factory workers and farmers, were continued mechanization and deskilling of the work, resulting in fewer jobs, lower pay, less desirable working conditions, and finally, economic abandonment. Industrialization uses people to transform natural resources – minerals, timber, soils, water – into economic resources for sale and consumption. Mechanization and deskilling diminish the value of workers. Consumption and waste diminish the value of natural resources. When both resources and people in one place have been devalued or depleted, industry simply moves on to fresh supplies elsewhere, leaving behind a blighted land of forgotten promise. The sustainability of agriculture, food production, rural communities, and of American society, demands on a fundamentally different approach to resource development.
Thankfully, a new, more sustainable, approach to farming and food production already is emerging to replace current industrial food and farming systems. This new sustainable agriculture is being developed primarily by farmers, rather than by the people in our agricultural universities or government agencies. These new farmers may label themselves organic, biodynamic, ecological, natural, holistic, practical, innovative, or nothing at all; but they all agree on the fundamental ecological, economic, and social principles of sustainability.
Sustainable farming systems must be ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially responsible. All three are essential; more of one cannot offset a lack of either of the other two. The three dimensions of sustainability are not part of some formal or legal definition, but instead, are a matter of common sense. If the land loses its ability to produce, the farm is not sustainable. If the farmer goes broke, the farm is not sustainable. And if a system of farming fails to support society, it will not be supported by society, and thus, is not sustainable. The economic, ecological, and social dimensions of sustainability are all necessary – none is more important than are the others.
Sustainable food and farming systems must be regenerative and renewing, rather than exploitative and extractive. The resources of the land must be continually renewed and regenerated. The people of the land, farmers, and people of society must be continually renewed and regenerated – in body, mind, and spirit. And if the land and people are to be renewed and regenerated, the people who farm and eat must be able to afford to care for the land and to care for each other. Sustainable agriculture is not just about sustaining agriculture, it is about sustaining people through agriculture. It is about stopping the exploitation and extraction of industrialization and finding self-renewing, regenerative systems that will sustain the land, sustain rural people, and sustain all people, of all times.
Most of the emphasis in sustainable agriculture, thus far, has focused on finding and refining more sustainable systems of farming. However, emphasis is now beginning to shift to finding more sustainable systems for marketing and distribution of agricultural products – to creating a more sustainable food system. Until recently, most sustainable farmers marketed their products directly to their customers, at farmers markets, roadside stands, on-farm sales, or through community supported agricultural organizations (CSAs). The Mount Laurel Organic Garden CSA is a prime example of the latter. These marketing methods will continue to be relevant and appropriate for many sustainable farmers in the future. Perhaps even more important, these methods embody the fundamental principles that must be incorporated into all sustainable food systems of the future.
The challenge of today is to find new marketing alternatives that will allow far larger numbers of farmers to produce food for far larger numbers of customers without compromising the principles of sustainability. The challenge is to develop a sustainable food system capable of eventually displacing the current industrial system of large-scale production and mass marketing of food.
The Grow Alabama program, a farmer to consumer cooperative, represents an attempt to take a logical next step toward developing a sustainable, alternative food system. In essence, Grow Alabama is a multi-farm CSA. In a typical CSA, one farmer has to connect with enough customers to support his or her farm, typically 100-200 members for a full-time operation. To be successful, the farmer must provide his or her customers a wide assortment of types and varieties of quality food items each week over the full length of the local growing season. It can be quite challenging to find a sufficient number of customers who value the freshness, flavor, and variety of a particular seasonal assortment of foods from locally adapted crops and livestock. Consequently, the number of CSA organizations, while continually growing, remains relatively small. A multi-farm CSA would seem to remove many of the constraints to future growth of the CSA concept.
By participating in multi-farm CSA, a farmer can increase efficiency by reducing the assortment of items produced to a manageable level, while maintaining sufficient economic and ecological diversity to ensure sustainable. Farmers in a multi-farm CSA need not be full time farmers, and may even be beginning farmers, because they don’t have 100-200 customers depending solely on them to provide a wide assortment of high quality products each week. And, farmers in a multi-farm CSA can spend less time recruiting customers, leaving more time for farming and for experimenting with new crops, growing methods and a family life. From the customers’ perspective, a multi-farm CSA may provide even a wider assortment of higher quality food items on a more consistent basis over an extended growing season.
The primary challenge in sustaining a multi-farm CSA is in maintaining the personal connectedness, and thus, the ecological and social integrity of the system. This personal connection between customers with their farmers, and through farmers, with the earth, is critical to maintaining the ecological and social integrity necessary to ensure sustainability. The commitment of farmers and eaters to care for each other and to care for the earth is maintained through personal relationships of integrity. With a multi-farm CSA, another person, an organizer and marketing agent, is brought into the farmer-customer relationships. The function of this third person must be that of a connector of farmers and eaters, a builder of relationships. The marketing agent for a CSA may change the nature of the farmer-eater relationship, but cannot replace or eliminate this relationship without threatening the sustainability of the system.
As we attempt to create a new more efficient food system, we must remain ever mindful that sustainability is about more than just food. It’s about reconnecting and renewing people – farmers, rural residents, eaters, and members of society in general – who have been disconnected, deskilled, demeaned, and exploited by industrialization. It’s about reconnecting people with an earth that has been eroded, polluted, and degraded by industrialization. If we lose sight of these basic principles while creating a more-efficient, larger-scale, alternative food system, the new food system will be no more sustainable than the industrial system we are trying to replace.
Sustainable agriculture is about renewing and regenerating the land and the people of our “used up” rural places – in Alabama, in America, and all around the world. Sustainable agriculture is about building new kingdoms, kingdoms not made up of lords and slaves, but of people working together, in harmony, for a better life and a better world for all people of all times. It is about transforming our Third Worlds into New Worlds. Sustainable agriculture is about more than food.
[1] John Ikerd is Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO – USA.
E-mail: JEIkerd@AOL.COM web site: http://www.ssu.missouri.edu/faculty/jikerd
[2] John Aricibald and Jeff Hansen, “Life is short, prosperity is long gone,” The Birmingham News, May 12, 2002.
