**The below is no longer endorsed, these people apparently do exist in numbers**
However, one important weakness I saw is that it's very one sided and generally fighting a bit of a strawman. You look at what would happen if humanity was to return to medieval agricultural yield levels. I find that no group of people in the world is actually arguing for this. My impression is that there are two big camps on this end of things, arguing for very different things:
- Camp 1 is the groups of people (e.g. anarchoprimitivists) that propose that humans lived a more natural and happy life as hunter gatherers and therefore that is the state we should return to, by ending farming altogether and reducing the population of the planet by many orders of magnitude. The bases of this claim are hotly debated but in good part debunked, even by notorious proponents of related ideologies: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism - Although some opponents do admit that the advent of agriculture may have made people's lives worse for a considerable period of time, compared to hunter-gatherer baseline - see https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/
All in all, not really a serious alternative, but one that still capture some segments of popular imagination. But not at all arguing for returning to medieval agriculture.
- Camp 2 is more serious, we're talking about the people generally advocating moving to *regenerative agriculture* away from high-yield industrial agriculture. This is the group that the first article I linked to specifically critiques. This type of lower yield, higher sustainability agriculture is based on small farms and gardens is often based on philosophies like permaculture, agroecology, agroforestry, restoration ecology, keyline design, and holistic management. Some of them are not even against mechanization in agriculture as along as it is done sustainably and using techniques that are not fossil-fuel intensive, working at the interface between precision agriculture and regenerative agriculture. You can find plenty of examples from a quick google search but here's one as a sample: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/opinion/comment-four-ways-technology-is-driving-regenerative-agriculture/
I argue that the post would be seriously improved using baseline yields of regenerative agriculture systems as the comparison, as opposed to preindustrial yields. I think the story would play out similarly, but it would be a more realistic, fair and useful comparison. I'd argue these are the real-world "opponents" of the ideas you defend in this post, and as such it would be more useful to write posts like these in conversation with their ideas, instead of with the idea of returning to medieval agriculture which as far as I can tell nobody is arguing for- a strawman makes for an easy fight.
In a sense this is article is a strawman or weak man, in that I'm arguing here against ideas that propose something stupid as far as I see it: removing synthetic inputs and/or mechanisation. However, they genuinely do exist as a position. Organic farming is popular in some circles and people hope it could reduce world hunger if generally adopted despite it violating historical lessons and the laws of biology (Liebig's minima for example), and I come across the arguments laid out in the books above reasonably commonly frequently. We wouldn't be going back to medieval yields (probably ~2.5 tonnes/ha rather than ~0.8 or so) but it would be damaging, and there's no U shaped sliding scale on these ideas, it's dumb for one country, dumb for 10% of a country, and catastrophic as a full system intervention.
I don't argue against your camp 2, as I'd broadly say I'm in that camp. I'm all for growth and doing more with less, and internalizing externalities into decisionmaking is great. Intensive farming can be terribly destructive, and we don't want to simply maximise output per land or minimize simple cost, that's certainly a noob trap. That's why I didn't argue against that camp, though I certainly should highlight it in other posts.
I'm worried about people who see these intensive farming failures, and then rejecting the whole paradigm as unworkable. While that might be strawmanning its definitely a postion I encounter and wanted to address. If polled, I assume lots of people would have conceptions very different to what the food system data actually shows, and that was what I was trying to get at. Some countries have tried adopting these policies even (Sri Lanka for example, though it's always complicated, the Netherlands tried flirting with something too), it might be a weak man position, but it's held by real people doing real damage.
After more consideration I retract that you're arguing against a strawman. I think I just haven't had the misfortune of meeting a lot of people in the camp you're arguing against in real life, which is why I was confused. On a second read of the first article I linked (https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/ - highly recommended), I realize that it's arguing against exactly the same thing in very similar terms as you are. So these people definitely exist. Let's call them proponents of "Repeasantisation" (in their own words). Here is an excerpt from the article:
"To make these obvious statements is to become the sworn enemy of many food and farming writers, influencers and film-makers (who have a lucrative industry of their own to support) [...] To make these statements with the support of numbers is to multiply the sin [...] Why? Because the romantic story of how food “should” be produced is entirely qualitative. It’s an aesthetic reverie. It’s about pictures, poetry, gut feeling – understandable when it comes to food but, literally, lethal when it comes to ensuring everyone has it [...] There are two entirely different questions here: “what production systems do certain well-nourished food writers in the rich world want to see?”, and “how might everyone on Earth be fed?”. But, though often leading to very different conclusions, they are endlessly and callously confused with each other.
This Monbiot guy also contrasts doughnut economy with the people who want everyone to be peasants again. As doughnut economy seems like the most widely accepted degrowth concept to me, it seems wrong to group degrowth in general and the "everybody should be a peasant again" people in the same group.
It kinda feels like you take the view of a fringe group that is very loosely related to degrowth and argue as their ideas are the main thing that degrowth is after.
Does he, though? The passage doesn't read that way to me.
Here's the relevant passage for reference:
"It is true that cities rely on unsustainable and exploitative models of extraction, consumption and dumping. But this applies to the economy as a whole, urban or otherwise. The answer, I believe, is not to rain curses on them and their people, but to replace the destructive economic models with systems in which everyone’s needs are met without breaching planetary boundaries. This is what Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics seeks. I believe we can move towards her vision with the help of what I call “private sufficiency, public luxury”. None of this, of course, magics away the need to produce sufficient food."
Nice summary Mike. However, it feels to me a bit like a strawman of degrowth. The argument you seem to make is: "Degrowth wants us to completely stop modern agriculture and this would be really bad."
The way I have understood degrowth so far is more in the way of doughnut economics. So, mainly making sure that we don't overstep planetary boundaries, while working on a more equal distribution of resources and not a complete abolition of agriculture.
There are reasonable proposals to reform agriculture at the margins certainly, and some of those involve lower inputs.
However, with this I wanted to discuss some of the larger more systemic proposals - those that suggest adopting organic farming or even returning to smallholder plots. It might be reasonable to describe them as fringe, certaintly they're not likely to be implemented soon, but I've had multiple people recommend the books to me, and asked why they couldn't be a solution to famine. Some of these people were reasonably high up in their fields, and there seems to be a lot of confusion on the subject - lots of people had perceptions of the facts on the ground that were radically different from reality.
The concern is that these proposals for degrowth - particularly around scaling back mechanisation and fertilisers - push us further over planetary boundaries, and that's true for partial adoption too.
These bigger proposals are also just more interesting to discuss to be fair, especially as they can be talked about in terms of the whole food system. That's probably the main reason I chose them.
Do you have some resources where they talk about in such a way as you criticize here?
From your descriptions it sounds to me like you think that organic agriculture adoption would be bad in general? Or how do you see organic agriculture pushing us beyond the boundaries?
Both Sitopia and The Agricultural Dilemma are long books, but to summarize without a full review:
Sitopia looks at the shape of cities today and their countryside (Carolyn Steel is an architect) - and argues that cities being decoupled from the land that feeds them has had very negative impacts for food, inequality and other metrics. There's a TED talk by her here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLOHsc86Ikc - but bascially in the book it's that there are hidden costs of our high input system that actually means that food is very expensive by her estimates. She therefore argues that cities should bring the land back to themselves, chemicals and fertilizers should be banned, and we should accept that growing and preparing food will just have to consume the majority of our lives, and live slow. There's a farm on the outskirts of London that actually uses her principles (call Sitopia) - though again it's worth noting it grows vegetables not grains. The proposals are impossible - as I discuss above, but they're very radical and degrowth of both mechanisation and all synthetic inputs.
The Agricultural Dilemma argues that high input farming is also secretly very costly just hidden (both books claim this to explain the decline in real food prices). Farmers being reliant on external inputs is a devil's pact and means that they're in a red queen's race to adopt the latest technology, whose value is captured by the seller of the equipment or input. Glenn Davis Stone (the author) obviously is not a fan of Adam Smith, but anyway he argues that instead we should return to what he confusingly calls "intensive" agriculture, which is intensive on labour and skills and local knowlege not any external inputs and machinery, citing his experience in Nigeria (he's an anthropologist). I had the book recommended to me by two different high ranking EAs, which was partly why I wrote this - he's straight wrong on most of what he writes, and has to end up directly arguing against Borlaug in a fairly funny and bold conclusion. But again - massive degrowth in all inputs including machinery - that's going to kill people.
I see organic farming as unable to feed the world by any reasonable metric, but that would need another post, and possibly more work on the losing complexity paper that is building on Jessica and yours! Might be worth a discussion sometime?
Thanks for the detailed answer. Alright seems like there are people that really argue that we should all be farmers again^^
I am always a bit torn between the two sides of the argument. I get that efficiency is important and that it would be bad if everybody has to be a farmer again. However, our current way of farming seems pretty unsustainable in the long run to me (e.g. the massive amounts of soil erosion modern agriculture results in). So, it seems to me like the current way of doing agriculture cannot be maintained, but the alternatives also suck.
Very interesting data-driven post Mike. It reminded me of this good one: https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/
**The below is no longer endorsed, these people apparently do exist in numbers**
However, one important weakness I saw is that it's very one sided and generally fighting a bit of a strawman. You look at what would happen if humanity was to return to medieval agricultural yield levels. I find that no group of people in the world is actually arguing for this. My impression is that there are two big camps on this end of things, arguing for very different things:
- Camp 1 is the groups of people (e.g. anarchoprimitivists) that propose that humans lived a more natural and happy life as hunter gatherers and therefore that is the state we should return to, by ending farming altogether and reducing the population of the planet by many orders of magnitude. The bases of this claim are hotly debated but in good part debunked, even by notorious proponents of related ideologies: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism - Although some opponents do admit that the advent of agriculture may have made people's lives worse for a considerable period of time, compared to hunter-gatherer baseline - see https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/
All in all, not really a serious alternative, but one that still capture some segments of popular imagination. But not at all arguing for returning to medieval agriculture.
- Camp 2 is more serious, we're talking about the people generally advocating moving to *regenerative agriculture* away from high-yield industrial agriculture. This is the group that the first article I linked to specifically critiques. This type of lower yield, higher sustainability agriculture is based on small farms and gardens is often based on philosophies like permaculture, agroecology, agroforestry, restoration ecology, keyline design, and holistic management. Some of them are not even against mechanization in agriculture as along as it is done sustainably and using techniques that are not fossil-fuel intensive, working at the interface between precision agriculture and regenerative agriculture. You can find plenty of examples from a quick google search but here's one as a sample: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/opinion/comment-four-ways-technology-is-driving-regenerative-agriculture/
I argue that the post would be seriously improved using baseline yields of regenerative agriculture systems as the comparison, as opposed to preindustrial yields. I think the story would play out similarly, but it would be a more realistic, fair and useful comparison. I'd argue these are the real-world "opponents" of the ideas you defend in this post, and as such it would be more useful to write posts like these in conversation with their ideas, instead of with the idea of returning to medieval agriculture which as far as I can tell nobody is arguing for- a strawman makes for an easy fight.
In a sense this is article is a strawman or weak man, in that I'm arguing here against ideas that propose something stupid as far as I see it: removing synthetic inputs and/or mechanisation. However, they genuinely do exist as a position. Organic farming is popular in some circles and people hope it could reduce world hunger if generally adopted despite it violating historical lessons and the laws of biology (Liebig's minima for example), and I come across the arguments laid out in the books above reasonably commonly frequently. We wouldn't be going back to medieval yields (probably ~2.5 tonnes/ha rather than ~0.8 or so) but it would be damaging, and there's no U shaped sliding scale on these ideas, it's dumb for one country, dumb for 10% of a country, and catastrophic as a full system intervention.
I don't argue against your camp 2, as I'd broadly say I'm in that camp. I'm all for growth and doing more with less, and internalizing externalities into decisionmaking is great. Intensive farming can be terribly destructive, and we don't want to simply maximise output per land or minimize simple cost, that's certainly a noob trap. That's why I didn't argue against that camp, though I certainly should highlight it in other posts.
I'm worried about people who see these intensive farming failures, and then rejecting the whole paradigm as unworkable. While that might be strawmanning its definitely a postion I encounter and wanted to address. If polled, I assume lots of people would have conceptions very different to what the food system data actually shows, and that was what I was trying to get at. Some countries have tried adopting these policies even (Sri Lanka for example, though it's always complicated, the Netherlands tried flirting with something too), it might be a weak man position, but it's held by real people doing real damage.
After more consideration I retract that you're arguing against a strawman. I think I just haven't had the misfortune of meeting a lot of people in the camp you're arguing against in real life, which is why I was confused. On a second read of the first article I linked (https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/ - highly recommended), I realize that it's arguing against exactly the same thing in very similar terms as you are. So these people definitely exist. Let's call them proponents of "Repeasantisation" (in their own words). Here is an excerpt from the article:
"To make these obvious statements is to become the sworn enemy of many food and farming writers, influencers and film-makers (who have a lucrative industry of their own to support) [...] To make these statements with the support of numbers is to multiply the sin [...] Why? Because the romantic story of how food “should” be produced is entirely qualitative. It’s an aesthetic reverie. It’s about pictures, poetry, gut feeling – understandable when it comes to food but, literally, lethal when it comes to ensuring everyone has it [...] There are two entirely different questions here: “what production systems do certain well-nourished food writers in the rich world want to see?”, and “how might everyone on Earth be fed?”. But, though often leading to very different conclusions, they are endlessly and callously confused with each other.
Let's not make the mistake of conflating them with proponents of regenerative agriculture as I did in my earlier comment, which while lower-yielding (https://www.metabolic.nl/news/organic-vs-regenerative-farming-whats-the-difference/), does not argue for a return to peasantry and (implied) food scarcity.
This Monbiot guy also contrasts doughnut economy with the people who want everyone to be peasants again. As doughnut economy seems like the most widely accepted degrowth concept to me, it seems wrong to group degrowth in general and the "everybody should be a peasant again" people in the same group.
It kinda feels like you take the view of a fringe group that is very loosely related to degrowth and argue as their ideas are the main thing that degrowth is after.
Does he, though? The passage doesn't read that way to me.
Here's the relevant passage for reference:
"It is true that cities rely on unsustainable and exploitative models of extraction, consumption and dumping. But this applies to the economy as a whole, urban or otherwise. The answer, I believe, is not to rain curses on them and their people, but to replace the destructive economic models with systems in which everyone’s needs are met without breaching planetary boundaries. This is what Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics seeks. I believe we can move towards her vision with the help of what I call “private sufficiency, public luxury”. None of this, of course, magics away the need to produce sufficient food."
Hmmm it reads to me like he does contrast them ^^
The food sentence at the end seems to not refer to doughnut econ specifically, but is more like a general comment in my opinion.
Nice summary Mike. However, it feels to me a bit like a strawman of degrowth. The argument you seem to make is: "Degrowth wants us to completely stop modern agriculture and this would be really bad."
The way I have understood degrowth so far is more in the way of doughnut economics. So, mainly making sure that we don't overstep planetary boundaries, while working on a more equal distribution of resources and not a complete abolition of agriculture.
There are reasonable proposals to reform agriculture at the margins certainly, and some of those involve lower inputs.
However, with this I wanted to discuss some of the larger more systemic proposals - those that suggest adopting organic farming or even returning to smallholder plots. It might be reasonable to describe them as fringe, certaintly they're not likely to be implemented soon, but I've had multiple people recommend the books to me, and asked why they couldn't be a solution to famine. Some of these people were reasonably high up in their fields, and there seems to be a lot of confusion on the subject - lots of people had perceptions of the facts on the ground that were radically different from reality.
The concern is that these proposals for degrowth - particularly around scaling back mechanisation and fertilisers - push us further over planetary boundaries, and that's true for partial adoption too.
These bigger proposals are also just more interesting to discuss to be fair, especially as they can be talked about in terms of the whole food system. That's probably the main reason I chose them.
Do you have some resources where they talk about in such a way as you criticize here?
From your descriptions it sounds to me like you think that organic agriculture adoption would be bad in general? Or how do you see organic agriculture pushing us beyond the boundaries?
Both Sitopia and The Agricultural Dilemma are long books, but to summarize without a full review:
Sitopia looks at the shape of cities today and their countryside (Carolyn Steel is an architect) - and argues that cities being decoupled from the land that feeds them has had very negative impacts for food, inequality and other metrics. There's a TED talk by her here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLOHsc86Ikc - but bascially in the book it's that there are hidden costs of our high input system that actually means that food is very expensive by her estimates. She therefore argues that cities should bring the land back to themselves, chemicals and fertilizers should be banned, and we should accept that growing and preparing food will just have to consume the majority of our lives, and live slow. There's a farm on the outskirts of London that actually uses her principles (call Sitopia) - though again it's worth noting it grows vegetables not grains. The proposals are impossible - as I discuss above, but they're very radical and degrowth of both mechanisation and all synthetic inputs.
The Agricultural Dilemma argues that high input farming is also secretly very costly just hidden (both books claim this to explain the decline in real food prices). Farmers being reliant on external inputs is a devil's pact and means that they're in a red queen's race to adopt the latest technology, whose value is captured by the seller of the equipment or input. Glenn Davis Stone (the author) obviously is not a fan of Adam Smith, but anyway he argues that instead we should return to what he confusingly calls "intensive" agriculture, which is intensive on labour and skills and local knowlege not any external inputs and machinery, citing his experience in Nigeria (he's an anthropologist). I had the book recommended to me by two different high ranking EAs, which was partly why I wrote this - he's straight wrong on most of what he writes, and has to end up directly arguing against Borlaug in a fairly funny and bold conclusion. But again - massive degrowth in all inputs including machinery - that's going to kill people.
I see organic farming as unable to feed the world by any reasonable metric, but that would need another post, and possibly more work on the losing complexity paper that is building on Jessica and yours! Might be worth a discussion sometime?
Thanks for the detailed answer. Alright seems like there are people that really argue that we should all be farmers again^^
I am always a bit torn between the two sides of the argument. I get that efficiency is important and that it would be bad if everybody has to be a farmer again. However, our current way of farming seems pretty unsustainable in the long run to me (e.g. the massive amounts of soil erosion modern agriculture results in). So, it seems to me like the current way of doing agriculture cannot be maintained, but the alternatives also suck.
Happy to discuss this further.