Episode 4 - Nov 8, 2020

We’ve talked about water. We’ve talked about life. Now it’s time to talk about dinner. The menu includes agro-ecology and sustainable food, prepared by farmer Chris Smaje.

Learn more about Rising Tide and stream the movie at novaslc.org/crossroads.

Hosts:
Rebecca McFaul, Fry Street Quartet violinist (Twitter @RebeccaMcFaul)
Dr. Rob Davies, Utah State University Dept of Physics (Twitter @robsMast)

Guest:
Chris Smaje, farmer and social scientist (smallfarmfuture.org.uk, Twitter @CSMaje)

produced by Chris Myers (argylearts.com)

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to The NOVA Podcast.

Rebecca McFaul:

Welcome to The NOVA Podcast. I'm Rebecca McFaul, a violinist with the Fry Street Quartet, which is in residence at the Caine College of the Arts at Utah State University. And we're also currently serving as co-music directors for the NOVA Chamber Music Series in Salt Lake City. This is Episode Four of the Crossroads series, and the subject is food. Recently, my colleagues in the Fly Street Quartet, alongside physicist Dr. Robert Davies premiered the film version of Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project, a multidisciplinary performance project addressing issues of global sustainability. To talk a bit more about this project, I'd like to introduce my co-host, colleague, and full disclosure also my husband, Rob Davies.

Dr. Robert Davies:

Hi, Rebecca. Thank you and hello, everybody. I'm Rob Davies, as you heard professor of physics at Utah State University, focusing on global change and critical science communication, and as you heard, co-creator of The Crossroads Project along with my friends, the Fry Street Quartet. So I want to thank again, the NOVA Chamber Music Series and the Utah State University and the Caine College of the Arts for supporting this work, a bunch of other folks as well who we will tag at the end of the show. So just a few words about Crossroads before we get going, and so Crossroads is about the rules of nature, as many of you who've seen the film will know, and the rules of civilization and their current misalignment. And we talk about water, we talk about life, food and society and with respect to society, we talk about our energy system and our food system and our economic systems. So today, as we say in the performance, we've talked about water on this podcast, we've talked about life. And now it's time to talk about dinner.

And so if you haven't seen the film, you can view it for free. The NOVA Chamber Music Series is making it available on YouTube. We'll put a link in the comments below and in the banner below me. But just to start off today's conversation, here's just a taste of how we talk about dinner, as I say in the performance. So we'll just take a look at a short clip here.

We need to eat. We've talked about water and we've talked about life. It's time to talk about dinner. And there are pieces of the biosphere, very special pieces called primary producers or autotrophs. Special, well because they feed everyone else, they're in the oceans and they're on land, and most of them are microscopic. In the oceans, phytoplankton underlie all, thousands of microscopic species living near the surface in the light, moving energy from sun to substance and nourishing everything, like krill.

And together, phytoplankton and krill feed the whole of the oceans, from the tiniest creatures to the grandest. Along the way, phytoplankton produce half the world's oxygen, half the breath you just took, produced by these fine fellows, thank you very much. Now on land, we're tempted to think of plants as primary producers. But no, no, no. You see, underlying plants is soil. And I'm not talking about dirt. This is rock pounded to clay by water over millions of years and then infused with life.

So that's a little example of how we're talking about it in this part of the performance called forage, which is looking at the foundations of Earth's living systems, what it is that feeds everyone else. And there's one more piece that I want to play for you today. And that's a little bit later in the performance when we're talking about humanity's different systems, and this is what we have to say about humanity's system of food.

And troposphere is also industrial food, a system of food feeding billions by draining the land of water, washing away the soil and emptying the oceans of life. No longer a system of agriculture for human well being. But of agribusiness for shareholder return. This is a high input, high waste, low diversity, high impact system of food in overshoot, that we absolutely know will not last, because physics supersedes math.

Well, so clearly, we're trying to cover quite a bit of ground in just a short amount of time in this performance. And so these podcasts are intended, of course, to give us more room to explore these stories, and the telling of these stories in this way. And if you've been watching the podcast, you know that to help us do that, we've invited both scientific and artistic voices to the conversation practitioners. And ne such voice today is Rebecca McFaul herself, today my co host. But we have another very special guest with us whom I'm very excited to have here. I've been a big fan for over a decade. And this has been an opportunity to get to know this person much better. And we're very excited to have him here today. So Rebecca, could you tell us who's joining us today?

Rebecca McFaul:

Yes, our guest today is Chris Smaje. And in his own words, he's a former social scientist, an improper farmer and author. So Chris has co-worked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England for the last 15 years. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College on aspects of social policy, social identity and the environment. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agroecology, he's written for various publications such as The Land, Dark Mountain, Permaculture Magazine and Statistics Views, as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, and the Journal of Consumer Culture. Smaje writes the blog Small Farm Future, and is a featured author at resilience.org. Chris, you're joining us from Somerset today, I think. Welcome and thanks so much for being with us for this discussion.

Chris Smaje:

Well, thanks very much.

Rebecca McFaul:

So I gave a very, very short bio of you. But I'd like to invite you to tell tell us more about yourself and perhaps specifically about the pivot point in your life that kind of took you back to the farm.

Chris Smaje:

Yeah, good question. I wish I had a good answer to that. Yeah, I mean I studied anthropology as an undergraduate degree in London here in England, and I guess I got interested in peasant farming then, and partly in terms of the way that peasants are partly growing food for themselves, but are partly locked into these bigger global systems. And I was kind of interested in how that figured in their thinking. Funnily enough, at that time, I knew absolutely nothing about growing or farming myself. It was kind of an intellectual sort of interest. And then the way life works, I ended up kind of doing other things and putting that aside for 10, 15 years, not really focusing on food or farming or environmental issues at all.

And then I sort of gradually switched into the fact that we had these big issues, climate change, this was sort of in the late 90s, climate change was people were beginning to talk about this as a big issue. And I started, maybe you get to a certain age when you start thinking about where does my food come from, and sort of getting interested in gardening and so on. Yes, and I suppose at the same time, I was getting a little, feeling a bit stuck in a rut in academia. So I made this kind of crazy decision along with my wife to jack it all in, get a bit back down here in Somerset, and start being a farmer. And as I say, maybe not a proper farmer.

But yeah, so just start doing that, started growing vegetables basically on a small commercial scale, selling them, kind of we call it a veg box scheme over here, like a community supported agriculture kind of thing, where we were growing vegetables and selling them to people and we live on the edge of a small town here of about 25,000 people. So we started doing that. And that was interesting, hard, big learning curve. And I guess I had a slightly naive view that if I grew as many onions and carrots as I could, I'd somehow solve all the problems of the world. And of course, that didn't quite work out, didn't quite solve all the world's problems.

So then I a little bit, went back to my social science and maybe keyed in again to that kind of stuff about peasant agriculture that I'd studied when I was a young student and started sort of trying to put what I was doing into a bigger intellectual context, partly from the social science, what kind of social and economic and political systems that we all tied into that make dealing with these issues, dealing with climate change, dealing with with food issues so difficult. And also, perhaps although I don't have a farming or a science background as such, actually doing the farming and thinking about things like soils and plants and livestock and the ecology that I was part of, sort of putting, I was now able to put that in a little bit more of a sort of wider ecological context. And obviously, that very much ties in with some of the themes that you've been exploring in your work.

Rebecca McFaul:

Thank you.

Dr. Robert Davies:

Well, I think probably everyone can see why I was very interested to have Chris join us for this conversation. And Chris, I just want to let you know that, and I've told you this. But so I've been doing this work on the order of 15 years or so as well. But coming at it very much so from the position of an academic, and trying to do then communication, just helping people understand these issues, while at the same time helping myself. And I stumbled across you and your work with the Dark Mountain project, probably about 10 years ago, which is a collection of writers writing about these issues. And found your writings particularly useful and quickly found my way to small farm future and your essays and have discovered that and found your voice particularly interesting and unique, because it wasn't an academic voice. It's got these academic aspects to it. You have this training, and you certainly, but very much coming at it from a practitioner, but an incredibly articulate deep thinking practitioner, I would say it's been my experience. So this is really, I just want to say that you've helped me start thinking about these things in broader perspectives, going back more than a decade now and thank you. And so your work, whether you know it or not, but hopefully you can recognize a little bit of it certainly is in the script of this performance and this delivery.

Chris Smaje:

Let's get to it.

Dr. Robert Davies:

So I want to ask you, maybe just to start off with this, that certainly, part of what we want to do in the performance is talk about gaining a vision of where we want to go. We know we're not sustainable in just about any way civilizationally, certainly with our food system. But knowing that is different than knowing well, what would a sustainable and vibrant and just food system look like, embedded in a broader, sustainable and just and vibrant human system?

So that's one question, what does it look like? And then another question, of course that we need to answer is, okay, once we have a vision of the destination, how do we go there? How do we get ourselves to do that? And you've written, I would say quite eloquently about both of those. So let me just throw that out as an open ended little bit to muse about. So where do we want to work? What is the answer you've arrived at? What is your current thinking? Where it is we want to go? And also how we want to get there?

Chris Smaje:

Okay, tough questions. And yeah, I mean, as you know, I've just written this book, A Small Farm Future where I sort of try and go through a lot of this stuff. And part of my thing in that book is to say that there are no answers, basically, and not in a kind of despairing sense that there's nothing we can do but in the sense that there's no sort of magic bullet solutions. There's no kind of one single thing where it will make it all right. So we've got a lot of tough decisions and tough trade offs that we're facing, but essentially, I mean the clue is in the name of the book, I guess, or in the name of my blog. Essentially, I'm arguing that we need to re localize our economies and re localize production. And I mean, I'm kind of arguing that's going to happen anyway. I think it's unavoidable that it can happen in some better ways, or some worse ways. So part of what I'm about is trying to find some better ways in which it can happen, but I mean, I think as you show very eloquently in your film, the status quo, the present way we're doing things is entirely based on cheap fossil energy, which is not sustainable in the long run. And that's going to have all sorts of economic and political knock on implications.

So we got to rethink this. And if we sort of let it go by default, I think it could lead to a lot of conflict that's going to sort of end up with us being in sort of economic strife locally. So what we need to do is try and try and build sort of new agrarian local economies in a more convivial and congenial way. So that's kind of where I'm coming from.

I mean, sort of some of the underpinnings of that are partly, I think, if we have more people in an economy that's kind of basically grounded in the ecological potentialities of our local landscapes. We get better feedback. I mean, one of the problems, I mean again, you've shown all this very nicely in your film. We've got this kind of globalized system where the resources that we're using the food we're buying, what we're consuming is coming from somewhere else, somewhere that we don't know. And we already know what exit it's having.

So one argument for a small farm future is if we're producing our livelihoods more locally, the consequences of our actions come back to us and we can adjust accordingly. I guess there's also a whole series of arguments about ecological efficiency, where again, the cheapness of fossil fuels to the cheapness of energy has broken open the sort of little feedback loops and little mechanisms that we can otherwise use at a much lower energy cost to do the sorts of things we need to do. So I mean, a classic example here on our farm is we have composting toilets. So our liquid and solid wastes, shall we say, get collected up. We don't use any water. We're not flushing it away somewhere else using high energy water to take it away somewhere else, process it, and then sort of have it as a waste disposal problem. We're creating our own compost using the nutrients there to go back very carefully, I should add, especially if any of our customers are listening.

Certainly we don't use the solids. We don't put it straight on our salad plants that we sell, and so that's, again where modern learning what we know about microbiology and so on can be very important in getting these systems better tuned. But ultimately, it's a kind of low input, low impact system. And it's much more ecologically and biologically efficient. There's all sorts of ways in which the households that we live in can then interact with the gardens and the fields around us in the woodlands. We've got to get all this sort of battle of the domestic and the cropland and grassland and woodland. We've got to rethink that.

So that's a another way in which I think the future is going to be a small farm, a more local future. And then also, I guess rethinking the economy beyond fossil fuels. We've got to invest in low carbon economic sectors. We need to find work for people, good, fulfilling work in low carbon sectors. And there's any number of those education or music that you guys are involved in. A good example's various types of caring work, healthcare and so on.

But farming is clearly a crucial one. I mean, it still employs more people globally than any other single industry. And not all of those people are having a great time. But that's again, partly because of the bigger systems that they're tied into. So we've got to get more people into a more labor intensive, but hopefully a congenial type of farming and agriculture. I mean there's whole debates that you would know better than I do, Rob about all the issues about soil carbon sequestration and so on. And we can get into all that but basically, farming has the capability of being I mean debatable whether it can be negative carbon, but it can certainly be less of a carbon source than it presently is and it can provide us with a lot of our material needs and our livelihoods in a low carbon local way. So that's the sort of why. The how, shall I pause or launch into that?

Dr. Robert Davies:

Well, that was kind of a brilliant, very succinct exposition of just a few of the many ways that farming is so important. And you brought up one thing just now. So we'll come back to the question and finish it. But I think this is a good segue. One of the things you just brought up is that farming, agriculture still employs more people than any single industry. In other words, as we say in the film, we need to eat. And it's something that occupies our minds in a way all the time. And of course, part of trying to tell the story in this way with the film is connecting with that viscerally. And I think one of the things that does that is the music. And I want to bring Rebecca into this because I know Rebecca has some pretty, I think, thoughtful considerations as to the connections that get made, hopefully for an audience here and to introduce that, let me just ask, let's play this clip. This is a little bit of a music for the forage part of performance that's really addressing this notion of how we feed ourselves.

So it is we also know. All is not well in the oceans and all is not well on land. As oceans warm and turn to acid, well we toxify the living soil and watch it blow away.

Okay, well, that's about half the movement from Laura Kaminsky's piece Forage. And Rebecca, I know you've had some really interesting comments about just how this music, what it evokes in you about food.

Rebecca McFaul:

Yeah, well, Laura's writing is astonishing throughout the whole piece. And in this movement, what always happens to me when I hear it, there's this energized, relentless quality to Laura's writing. And somehow it kind of comes back to something really basic for me, just the very notion that every living being on this planet is looking to eat each and every day. And somehow stepping back to really ponder that always strikes me as astonishing. I mean for us lucky ones, we don't have to work too hard to know when we'll next be able to eat. But for many people, that isn't a given. And certainly for animals that are domesticated, it's the primary driver of the day's activity.

And so Laura's music, I think captures this brilliantly in kind of a wide range of emotions. Sometimes, the music is energetic and scurrying, kind of like the title Foraging. Sometimes there's tension that's created with rhythms that are tugging against what is otherwise felt as a groove in the writing. And the movement sort of ends with quite a bit of drama and maybe a little bit of a sense that we're pushing things to the brink. And so there is a visceral kind of understanding, I think that goes with just experiencing the music and letting it bring those things up. Because in our busy lives, our busy professional lives, there's so much that we take for granted and we don't maybe stop to think about these connections or ask where our food is coming from or ask if the privilege of knowing exactly, if we're going to be able to eat whenever we want to, how and why we have that and at what cost.

Dr. Robert Davies:

It is just this relentless, something that we're always concerned with. And yet we never think about those of us I think in that position, certainly the middle class, industrialized or developed world sort of lifestyle, we're somehow always thinking about food, but never really thinking about it. Chris, I'm interested and feel free to jump in too and we're going around back to the notion of how do we sort of get to this vision and some other aspects of this vision that you've articulated so well in this book about small farm future, but I'm interested, just as you listen to this telling of the story in this very different way in this performance, what did you make of that?

Chris Smaje:

Yeah, it was really interesting to hear Rebecca sort of giving those perceptions of it, and it very much rang true to me. And I thought, yeah, what you did really well in the film was show the kind of systemic nature of the way that all the interconnections in nature and the way that as Rebecca was just saying, the way that nature is this sort of huge symphony of organisms feeding and this huge kind of energy medley. I mean the interesting thing, I guess, is that from a human perspective, we can sort of afford to step back and say how marvelous and how beautiful it is. Whereas up close, if you're a spider that's been paralyzed by a parasitic wasp that's kind of laid its eggs inside your abdomen, it's not so great.

And I think this is one of the problems. We've got to have a nuanced discussion about this, because a lot of people say, "I like to watch nature on the TV, but it's pretty ugly up close." But unfortunately, I think as you show in your film, we can't step outside of it. We are part of that story. And we can get so wrapped up in all our electronic devices and being inside the house that we forget we're actually animals. We are part of the story. And we are part of the story of planet Earth. There's only the one planet that we're on.

And so part of what agriculture is about is like all organisms, we try and make things easy for ourselves. And there's a lot of us on the planet. And so we try and push, we try and push the envelope. We try and make it more productive of the things we want and less productive of the things we don't want. And there are ways that we can do that. But I think as you've shown in the film, we can't do that infinitely. I mean there are people who argue that yeah, we can. It's just about the next kind of techno fix around the corner.

But I think you've shown pretty nicely in the film that it's very easy, with cheap energy, we've sort of pushed all these systems way out of whack, and they're coming back on us in various ways that we need to deal with without kind of silver bullet solutions. We need to do the hard work. We need to be creatures. We need to be organisms sort of in that story and figuring it out. And there are ways that we can figure it out, but again I guess it's kind of my mantra, the way that we can figure it out is by being farmers, being in our localities producing food for ourselves dealing with... it's like all other organisms, it's a big sort of game of push something out there and get the reaction back and constantly adjusting to that. There's no way out of that. That's the game that we've got to play.

Rebecca McFaul:

I wonder if I could jump in for just a second and in the last podcast with our guests, the conversation actually moved from life to food because of course, they're inextricable from one another. And it was revealed that everybody on the podcast was a gardener. Our wonderful painter, Rebecca Allan, whose beautiful Tondo paintings that you just saw on the previous clip, has included a really serious study of horticulture in her life in recent years. And Brad, my colleague in the quartet has completely transformed his yard in all kinds of ways. He's growing food and low water plants and has a habitat for a desert tortoise. And I wonder, I think sometimes when things come up, like you hear something like a small farm future, and it might scare some people that abundance is going away, or that it's going to be a return to drudgery.

And what struck me in the last podcast with my colleagues and through my own experience, gardening is actually some things, some really important richness that it returns to one, the act of doing it, the act of tending the soil, cultivating it, nourishing actually being a part of that cycle, like you just, even just composting your food and knowing that it's going to contribute to the health of the land around you. There's a satisfaction in that. And so I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what might be gained in, I mean, beyond just the abstract notion that we better do this or else?

Chris Smaje:

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I mean a couple of really interesting things that sort of strike me from what you've just said, I mean one is, there's almost two contradictory narratives. One is that farming is this life of drudgery and misery that thank goodness, we've escaped from it. But the other is that people actually love to be out in the garden, they love to be growing food, they love to be interacting with nature. And to some extent, both of those narratives are true. But obviously, what we need to do is accentuate the second narrative, and try and minimize the first narrative. And I think part of the first narrative is a historical memory, not so much of the intrinsic drudgery of farming, but human systems, exploitive systems. If you think about serfdom or slavery, people being forced to work the land basically to somebody else's benefit, because they had no choice.

So part of the idea of a small farm future for me is people having autonomy over their own livelihood, control over their own production. And that can be, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy. I think there are difficulties that we have to confront. But I mean, hard work is often, I mean I talk about this a little bit in my book. Sort of many aspects of our culture, we say it's great. We're hard working people, that's a good thing. And then people say, "Well, I don't want to work hard on the farm, well a bit of physical work." People are going down to the gym, doing all sorts of crazy things to be fit, so I mean nobody wants to be hurrying a mile long row of cabbages all day.

So we need to have a more nuanced debate about that. But we need to focus on the positive story about gardening, which is that it's a good thing to do. It keeps you fit. It gets you outdoors, connects you with nature, produces food that's part of the part of the cycle of nature that we're part of. Well, I was just going to say the other thing that I pick up on that you mentioned is gardening or horticulture rather than farming. And I think that's a really key point as part of the intro about me not being a proper farmer, because we've got into this whole way of thinking that farming is something done on a very broad scale with huge machinery, get people out of farming, big tractors, big combines, and it's really a very small number.

I think 65% of the global cropland is devoted to just 10 commodity crops. And we're talking about things like wheat and soya, and so on. And so these are all things that are easily tradable, easily transportable, easily processable. And there's nothing wrong with I mean, the reason those crops are so widespread is because they have some great characteristics. So I'm certainly not saying we shouldn't be growing any of those crops. But I think we need to break down this distinction between farming and gardening. We can grow wheat, you can grow soy on a garden scale, but you can incorporate it with a whole bunch of other fruits and vegetables, tree crops. And I think we need to be getting into that mindset, that part of the problem that we've got, we can sort of debate the issues that you raise in the film about soil erosion, and so on, different perspectives on that.

Partly this has arisen, because where I am here in Southern England, it's quite a friendly environment for farming. It's a temperate, moist climate. It's quite forgiving for farming. But obviously, what happened historically was that European farmers went out as colonists to other parts of the world where they practice the same type of farming and didn't work out so well in more arid climates. So part of this is about trying to recover indigenous practices that people have worked out agriculturally in their own regions. And obviously, there's a story of colonial history and colonial conflict that we need to address there as well. But essentially, I think that part of what I argue is that we need to, which is why I'm not a proper farmer, is to get again, and it's in the title of Small Farm Future, there's a gradation, there's a continuum between growing some herbs on a window box in your apartment, through to one guy with a big tractor on 3,000 acres, and we need to, we're all farmers, I mean that's kind of what I say but we are all farmers, we're all eaters, we're all farmers, we're all invested in the food system.

So whatever we can do locally, to just to get that little bit more interested in our food system and just do our own little bits of production, that's what we need to do. But certainly diversifying, certainly thinking about not just wheat and soy, but also about vegetables, fruit tree crops, interaction between grass and cropland where livestock fits into all this, all of this is kind of back in the mix. And we need to be discussing it much more urgently, I think, and in a more nuanced way than we sort of generally have in recent years.

Dr. Robert Davies:

There's so much in there. But there's a couple of points that I wanted to stress out a bit more. One of them is this notion that Rebecca brought up. People think, "Oh, no.", and that you've certainly expanded upon, this notion of drudgery. But what you're proposing, your vision of a more sustainable and just and vibrant food system, number one is embedded in transforming other systems as well.

Chris Smaje:

Yeah, we'll come back to that.

Dr. Robert Davies:

But the other thing is, it's important to point out, I don't think that while there's a lot of notion of reconnecting to lost knowledge and lost ways, and often those are indigenous, as you talked about. So there is that aspect that I get out of what you're talking about, but you're also not advocating for returning to sort of a 19th century farm. Why is that?

Chris Smaje:

Yeah, I mean I suppose it's about a more nuanced debate about technology and the choices facing us. So we get into this terrible duality, that the past was awful and that the future is great. And we need to kind of get out of that. This is not a nostalgic argument about how it would be good to live like the 19th century. But it's an argument that if we look back, we can use whichever technologies we want. There's so much invested on this notion of sort of high tech as a kind of aesthetic of the future that we're going to get sort of richer and more sedentary and more urban.

And I mean, we don't have to. That to me, is not a particularly appealing vision, and we don't have to buy into it. But that doesn't mean that there are no aspects of modern tech. I mentioned the example of sort of microbiology and how we understand composting much better now than we used to. But the interesting thing, once we sort of get out of that whole progress versus nostalgia mindset, the interesting thing about looking back is that most parts of the world, people lived there a long time and figured out what a low impact, low energy farming system looked like and they were conscious of the issues that they face locally, whether it's aridity, water stress, fire stress, floods, fertility issues. And so we can learn from that. Basically all I'm saying, we can learn from that.

And once we've sort of abandoned this notion of some kind of high tech, urban, sort of disembodied existence, we can apply techniques that people used in the past, because they were good technological solutions to ongoing... we still face all these problems of aridity, fertility, floods or drought or whatever, fire, and we can look openmindedly at the answers people had in the past and say, "Oh yeah, we can draw on that and use that in our farming.", not sort of mindlessly replicate it, because it's like some rural museum. It's about learning from the totality of human experience. And people in the past had faced this and thought about this and figured out what's addressing it that we can learn from. That's pretty much all I'm saying.

Rebecca McFaul:

I love all of that. I want to just bring up a term that you mentioned, Chris, I think it came up in your blog, but this notion of permaculture and it's a notion that I've been pretty interested in for a number of years. And I think so the idea, in my mind, the way that it lives, is it's the study of how things intersect. How do you put things together so that they systemically work to support one another? So in permaculture, there's this idea that you can create plant guilds, and you have an overstory and an understory and different kinds of root systems that all work together to actually amend the soil in ways that the idea is you put the right things together, and it needs very little help from humans. And it's a fascinating, fascinating notion.

And actually, this kind of interactive system, at its ideal, in my mind lives very much the way a string quartet functions, and you have this common goal to serve the music. You bring your talents and your line to meld together to create something greater, something that's healthy. And one more notion that you talked about, which hopefully will relate to the other two, is just this idea of when you localize efforts, you're paying attention to weather patterns, you're paying attention to your community around you and you're letting those things inform you.

And I guess I'm just bringing it back to kind of how so much of our lives and the way we do things has become so outsized, enormous scale. And we think nothing of traveling around the globe to make these systems work, which of course is fossil fuel dependent. And that's true in agriculture. It's true in all kinds of industries. It's even true in my own field, where success is often defined by how far you go to give concerts and how often you do that. And I think in my work with The Crossroads Project over these last years, I'm also trying to do the work of reimagining what that field looks like. And I should just say that while we're talking about the food segment, there's also in the performance, the last segment is called Reimagine.

And this is what's so exciting about about your work and inspiring, Chris, is that you are really doing this work of reimagining how these systems can work and function. And I think, I hope that actually, it serves as inspiration for whatever field any one of us are in, that we turn our thinking more towards these interactive understandings and figure out how we can find richness in localizing and seeing that there's exciting potential in doing so. This is just a riff on broadening out kind of the food system conversation, but to share in that sense of reimagining I guess.

Chris Smaje:

Yeah, I mean...

Dr. Robert Davies:

Well, I think this is where you're going Chris, which is this notion of localization, I think you've written quite eloquently about how that works only if other things, localization of agriculture works only if other things are transformed as well. And maybe you can discuss that a bit.

Chris Smaje:

Yeah, I mean again, one way in terms of what Rebecca was saying about permaculture and localization, one of the issues again is because we've had this very abundant, cheap energy source with fossil fuels. It's like we can almost terraform the world to these kind of huge proportions of our own making. So much of what's going on in agriculture is, the most expensive aspect is human labor, therefore get labor out, so we have a huge machine. Well, then the huge machine needs to have a huge space to work at its most efficient. So the hedgerows come out, the woods, the boundaries come out, and then, that's sort of the cheap energy and I mean, you show it again nicely in the film, in terms of the sort of globalization of the economy and consumerism. You get this whole sort of systemic structure that kind of drives this uniformity at the local level, which is not serving local needs, and then it becomes very difficult for people to kind of reconfigure that to local needs.

Here where I live in Somerset, when the railways were built in the 19th century, we grow, it's a kind of relatively warm, relatively wet climate here so we grow good grass. So dairy farming became a big thing. And the trains would take the fresh milk up to London. So at one level, people say, this is the dairying area, which it kind of is and intrinsically, it's quite well suited to growing grass. But partly, it's got an agricultural history that's connected with urbanization, and fossil fuels, transport, getting milk to London, so we kind of need to rethink these things.

So yeah, permaculture originated from the notion of permanent agriculture. And a lot of it is just about kind of drawing on those lessons of people figuring out ecologically efficient forms of farming and sort of applying them in the present day. Sorry, I've slightly got off on a tangent from your question, Rob. But your other question was about the sort of larger systems within which this occurs. And I suppose what I would say there, and what I've tried to talk about, I do talk about at some length in the book is this rather bizarre economic system that we've got into where the food system, which is at the base of everything that is the one that gets the kind of least attention and the emphasis is on making food as cheap as possible, so that we can be doing all these other things.

And the way that particularly manifests certainly here in the UK, or in the U.S., is a whole story about land prices and access to land. So we have an economic system that tries to sort of extract maximum value from land. And if we're talking about urban settings or where people live, that's about housing. So people increasingly are paying big bucks to get a roof over their head. Here in the UK, I forget the exact figures, but I think sort of around about World War Two, people were spending 30% or 40% of their disposable income on food, and now it's 10% or less, but all of the rest is going on getting a roof over their head. Land prices are skyrocketing. And I talked about that in the book in terms of sort of economic theories, Ricardian rent and so on.

So again, that's another thing we need to do is get better collective access to the land that we need to live on and grow our food on. And then, everything knocks on from that. We've got a farming that tries to get labor out of farming, because that's the sort of highest cost aspect. But we need to kind of rethink that and we can't rethink that without rethinking other aspects of the economy, access to land, the price of land, the price of energy and so on. And again, in terms of the larger themes of your film, the whole history of agriculture in the rich countries over the last 100 years or more, has been the labor is expensive and energy is cheap. And so you get pushed on, and we've had this whole, that sort of thing to think through as well here on our farm. You get pushed towards a fossil fuel or a machine solution, because it's quicker and cheaper than a human labor solution.

But ultimately those solutions, I mean, I'm not saying there's no place for machines, but it tends to push against the sort of connections that Rebecca was talking about where you're thinking of those kind of ecologically rich and sort of human involving ways of producing food, which pushes you back towards the horticulture. So yeah, all of these things are interconnected. But ultimately, it's the systemic nature, which you show so well in the film, which has to do with a system that essentially says maximizing profit, is the way to organize society. The best way of delivering general well being is a system, which sort of unleashes profit making, or lets the leash off profit making.

And that's the sort of interesting one because again, I think this is kind of complicated story where we talk about the market. We need market based solutions. But again, in my book, I say, "Yeah, we need markets." But when I talk about the market, I think of it as an actual place that I go to sell my foods, not a kind of globalized, some quantitative, what's the price of wheat on the sort of Chicago exchange. And there's a whole fascinating history of development of global agribusiness around farming, and ultimately, the sort of derivative markets and all the baffling financial markets that people currently talk about when they talk about the market.

So again, it sounds like this kind of quaint thing. I'm saying, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice if we all went back to these sort of canvas owning sort of markets.", but really, that's the way that we've got to, it's the way that we can engage with producing our livelihoods locally from a sustainable ecological base. It is a kind of profit based system, but it's not one that makes profit making the heart, the roots of everything we do. If you make it possible for local farmers to make a decent, not an extravagant but a decent income from getting to the market and selling their wares, then we're kind of operating locally within the ecological base. If what you say, if the market is the sort of global price of wheat that's going to be affected by the cheapest price of wheat, the cheapest place that can produce wheat anywhere in the world, that's kind of undermining of that local, livelihood-based approach.

So I talk about that quite a bit in the book, but we sort of got into this way of thinking that the market is how the global corporate economy works, but it's not. In many ways, the global corporate system, tries to diminish markets and close them down, and is based on sort of finding best return to profit wherever it is in the world. And that knocks on in all of these sort of complex ways to the price of our housing, the price of our energy, price of our food. And I mean it's a big task, but in the light of the crises that you show so well in the film, we've got to rethink this whole thing absolutely, entirely from the ground up.

Dr. Robert Davies:

So and I know Rebecca has quite something she wants to bring up here, which I know is gonna be good. I just want to tie this up with something you yourself have said Chris, or I just read. You said small scale local agrarianism isn't well suited to generating salaried work, but it is well suited to generating livelihoods. And I think that's just such a fabulous perspective. I sometimes say that where we want to get to is where the goal is not making a killing, but making a living. [crosstalk 00:54:16] notion of the markets and really bringing it down to the local level is such a nice such a nice visualization of that. Rebecca?

Rebecca McFaul:

As I was listening, a sort of snapshot of my life that haunts me kept occurring to me and this is getting to the airport at some ungodly hour to make a flight. You get there, you're starving, and you maybe buy a coffee. It's got a plastic lid, and it's a disposable cup and you're hungry, trying to eat healthy, so you buy a banana, which has been individually wrapped in plastic and it's like $3. And working on this project, that whole scene is something that haunts me. And that's not to say that what I do as a performing musician and sharing music with other people and in other places has this wonderful richness and I'm not rejecting that, but I think once again, this kind of how we define success and how we define health needs to be under scrutiny kind of at all levels.

And I want to give a shout out actually to NOVA, which as I mentioned, my quartet is serving as co-music directors for, because NOVA does such an excellent job of featuring local artists and local musicians, and Utah has an absolute glut of wonderful musicians. And it's adventurous programming, and I think NOVA deserves to be seen as a model for the way that the artists are invested in the community and reflecting back what the community is interested in and going through and vice versa. The community is supporting its local artists and this notion of supporting livelihoods on a local level, rather than needing to engage in this kind of corporate global system, which is hard to stake a claim in. But staking a claim in your communities is something else entirely and has all of these other benefits that go hand in hand on a practical level, certainly a lower carbon footprint, but also richer connections with people that you see and interact with. And I think I just wanted to mention that from the perspective of my field, and my world that actually, this perspective is so useful, kind of wherever you are, with whatever you do.

Chris Smaje:

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And I mean one thing I would want to emphasize is I guess in the book, and generally in the alternative farming sector, we're always talking about localism, make it more local. And to some people, that can sound a bit exclusive, like you're turning your back on other parts of the world. And that's absolutely not the case. And obviously, music is a great example of where the connections that we can have with other people globally are potentially endless. An amazing thing about human culture is how much we learn from each other and teach each other new things and introduce new plants and new new types of farming. The possibilities to learn and interact with each other and create rich culture are endless.

And I think ironically, they're better if we are grounded in our own locales, and in producing our own livelihood. It's not about sort of turning your back on how other people do things or other people's cultures or knowledge. It's about grounding an economy that can then reach out in a richer way, than the sort of uniformity that we create by globalization. So yeah, that's really key. And I mean, I tried to sort of practice what I preached a month or so ago. I basically tried to live for a week, it was not a very long time, only from the produce on my own farm without yeah, consuming anything from our farm, and it was kind of obviously bidding on a farm.

It wasn't something that I'd sort of prepared for, so if I like worked up to it, and to some extent, we've been geared to producing vegetables for sale rather than just producing our own livelihood. I mean I'm sort of moving a little bit more in that direction, but it was interesting. On the one hand, how challenging it was, partly because, for example, we don't have, I do like coffee and part of this is is to what extent can we import a few luxuries, but try and ground our practice in producing most of our livelihood locally. But yeah, a nice milky coffee in the morning is something that I like a lot. Obviously, I can't produce coffee, and we don't have dairy animals on the farm. So that was a little bit of a struggle, but there are substitutes that we can create locally.

Somebody, a friend of mine here locally gave me these sorts of sloes, Blackthorn kind of wild plums, which were the best olive substitute that I've ever tasted. But it's so much easier to go to the store and buy a jar of olives than to think about what we have here locally that might do the job. But the interesting thing was because I was living off my own farm diet, it made me explore my own farm and think about, I got sea buckthorn and blackberries that normally I might think, I can't be bothered to walk down to the other side of the farm and spend ages picking these fiddly little berries. But because I was doing it and grounded in it, that's what I did and it was great. And it completely added and enriched my diet. Obviously, I kind of had to spend a little bit more time doing it. But that takes us back to this whole discussion we've been having about how we value our time compared to the energy, compared to biodiversity compared to other economic sectors. And these are the things we're starting from a difficult low base, but these are the things that really we need to be engaging with much more urgently, I think.

Dr. Robert Davies:

I think this is a wonderful sort of wrap of this notion of we know we have to change things. And that makes all of us nervous on all kinds of levels. But when you start to realize that involved in that change, that experience that you just described is also a prod, you're being pushed to explore the things right around you. We all relate to the fact that here in the town that I live, if there's a restaurant that opened recently, I won't know about it. I learned everything I was going to learn about this town in the first year. And now I don't explore as much and I used to pre-COVID say, "Oh, when I go to a new city, when I go traveling, well then I'm going to explore but I don't explore my own backyard sometimes." So Chris, I just want to thank you again for taking the time to talk with us. For those of you who are interested in Chris' website, smallfarmfuture.org is fabulous. His new book is fabulous. And in terms of envisioning both our food system and connecting it to the larger systems around us, I just can't think of a more erudite, interesting, soulful voice than Chris'. So I strongly urge everyone to explore his essays and work further. And I know we've got more people to think so thank you again, Chris. We've got a few more people to thank. Rebecca, could you help us out?

Rebecca McFaul:

Absolutely, yeah. And a heartfelt thank you for me to Chris for joining us today. And we have a list of seasoned sponsors who we need to thank. As my colleague Brad said at the last podcast, it takes a village. So we'd like to thank the Utah Legislature, Utah Division of Arts and Museums, the Lawrence T. and Janet T. Dee Foundation, the Salt Lake County Zoo Arts and Parks, the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation, iZotope, Salt Lake City Arts Council, the Cultural Vision Fund, Dominion Energy, Rocky Mountain Power Foundation, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Thank you all so much for joining us today.

Announcer:

This has been the NOVA Podcast. Our hosts were Rob Davies and Rebecca McFaul. Our guest was Chris Smaje. This episode was produced by Chris Myers. The NOVA Podcast is funded by listeners like you. You can donate to support NOVA's programming at novaslc.org. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Send an email to info@novaslc.org. On our next episode, system scientist Elizabeth Sawin and photographer Garth Lenz connect the dots of our discussions and help us see the big picture. We hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and share the NOVA Podcast with your friends. We'll see you next time.