Reclaim The Fields

[SarahBell]

http://www.reclaimthefields.org.uk/

Reclaim the Fields is a constellation of people and collective projects willing to go back to the land and reassume the control over food production.

[Ruffneck]

sounds like a great idea

[@contradevian]

Farmers and land owners "say no"

[porca misèria]

http://www.reclaimthefields.org.uk/

Reclaim the Fields is a constellation of people and collective projects willing to go back to the land and reassume the control over food production.

Hmmm, where have I heard that in recent years?

Aha, must be Zimbabwe, where landowners were relieved of their land by a constellation of people and collective projects. Turned out well, didn't it?

[The Eagle]

Aha, must be Zimbabwe, where landowners were relieved of their land by a constellation of people and collective projects. Turned out well, didn't it?

You watch too much propaganda MSM.

[JimDiGritz]

I prefer these guys

http://www.fieldtofarm.com/

[RufflesTheGuineaPig]

The problem is, small scale farming will never be anywhere near as productive as large-scale farming.

It's also worth noting that farming in general isn't very profitable. The money to be made is in owning land and forcing others to pay you to use it.

Edited February 27, 2012 by RufflesTheGuineaPig

[erat_forte]

But I don't want to live in a field weeding and harvesting crops. I would much rather work at my own specialism, for payment of some kind, and exchange that payment for produce from professional farmers who will be producing more and higher quality produce in greater variety.

Encouraging higher quality local producers in a vibrant local economy is a much better campaign than setting up permaculture eco-villages. But perhaps the latter can be used as a PR front for the former.

[Stret]

The problem is, small scale farming will never be anywhere near as productive as large-scale farming.

Depends on what you're measuring. Simply measuring the per acre (hectare/m^2/etc) output, small scale agriculture almost always out-performs large-scale quite easily, i.e. grows more food per given area.

But it uses a lot more labour and obviously whether that is "more productive" or not depends on the cost of the labour etc.

Generally speaking, large-scale agriculture is "more productive" because it has replaced relatively expensive labour with relatively cheap fossil fuels. Whether this is sustainable long term depends on how likely fossil fuels are to (a) last, and ( stay cheap. Bit unknowable in both cases really I'd say.

[Blue Peter]

Depends on what you're measuring. Simply measuring the per acre (hectare/m^2/etc) output, small scale agriculture almost always out-performs large-scale quite easily, i.e. grows more food per given area.

But it uses a lot more labour and obviously whether that is "more productive" or not depends on the cost of the labour etc.

Generally speaking, large-scale agriculture is "more productive" because it has replaced relatively expensive labour with relatively cheap fossil fuels. Whether this is sustainable long term depends on how likely fossil fuels are to (a) last, and ( stay cheap. Bit unknowable in both cases really I'd say.

+1

It's important to say in what respect something is more efficient or not. Large scale agriculture is more productive in terms of labour, than small-scale ag; possibly less efficient in terms of money (big ag tends to need subsidies to make a profit); and very less efficient in terms of energy produced against energy input,

Peter.

[clv101]

The problem is, small scale farming will never be anywhere near as productive as large-scale farming.

There's an interesting comment. What do you mean by "productive". Large scale farming has relatively low productivity per acre (because land and especially land tax is cheap) and relatively low productivity per unit input energy (because energy in the form of diesel, petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides etc. are cheap). On both these metrics small scale farming is considerably better than large scale farming.

The only metric where large scale farming wins is in productivity per unit labour - in part because labour is taxed so highly! This is also why, in the UK we now only have 0.7% of people working in primary agriculture.

In coming decades we can expect the cheap energy that has enabled one farmer to farm a 1000 acres to dry up, we can also expect unemployment to remain a problem. The win-win scenario here is to increase the number of people working in agriculture and potentially even increase productivity as the fossil fuel subsidy declines.

Remember, large scale farming is only labour efficient. It is not land or energy efficient.

[RufflesTheGuineaPig]