Let me start this essay off with two givens: the production of food is very important, and the production of food is very complicated. The production of food is also something that I know very little about. Oh, I can hold my own when it comes to baking bread or churning butter, but when it comes to actually growing the wheat or milking the cows, I’m in completely over my head. For that reason, I am not going to try to lay out my plan for a technosocialist method of agriculture. What I am going to try to do in this chapter is outline a way that the basic resources of agriculture (land, labor, seeds, equipment) can be provided within a technosocialist framework.
Let’s start with labor, and with the two different types of labor that it takes to grow and harvest crops. The most obvious type is farm laborers, people who can pick the crops, plant the seeds, etc. This sort of labor is fairly easily matched through the SNA system, and is a good way for young people who want to get out of the urban areas for a few months to do that while continuing to earn COntribution credit. The trickier type of labor to find is that of the knowledgable farmer. It is the farmer’s job to not only help plant the seeds and harvest the crop, but to know when to do this. A true farmer needs to know how much to water crops and in what conditions, what sorts of crops would grow best in what type of land, and the rest of the subtle arts of dealing with plants. To that end, farming is one of the few professions to require a fairly quantized educational program. Before an aspirant can take up a post as a farmer, they must have passed a large array of educational units on plant husbandry, seed germination, etc. including a meta-unit that makes sure they still remember all of their previous training and can put it to practical use.
Next, the farmer needs somewhere to farm. There are two different models for this, and farmers should be able to choose between them. He can simply reserve some land through the SNA system, rent or purchase his own equipment, hire labor directly and have it charged to his own Consumption score, and then recieve 100% of the Contribution credit from putting his crop on the Market. Alternatively, he can sign up through the SNA system to be the farmer of an established farm. In this case he will live on the farm for at least the growing season, and he will organize all planting, watering, harvesting, etc. for that season. Established farms generally already have their fields layed out and their equipment on the farm, and a crop history and soil analysis will be available to help the farmer decide what crops would be most appropriate.
We’ve already mostly covered the equipment issue, but just to reiterate: independent farmers are responsible for purchasing their own equipment through the Market. Farmers on established farms will have access to the equipment on that farm, and they can order new equipment for the farm without personal Consumption cost as long as the request is reviewed and granted by a panel of randomly selected citizens who are now or have been farmers.
Finally, seeds. At the historical point that I’m writing this, seeds can cause considerably more controversy than one might think. The questions of genetic modification is a tricky one, and I’m not going to come down wholeheartedly on one side or the other, but I will say this: if a scientist creates a genetically modified form of wheat, for example, that produces a better crop, he may be eligble to recieve Contribution value for the increase in crop yield. But if it later turns out that his modification had adverse health effects, he is also liable for the damage that it causes.
Now, the farmers in the system that I’ve described have quite a bit of independent power. And the decisions that they make have serious ramifications for the security of the food supply for the entire society. It is at least as important for there to be a quality control system for the food supply as for manufacturing. Let’s say that a farmer overseeing a 300 acre farm decides to plant corn even though the soil has been used for corn several years in a row and the soil is depleted. An automated survey of the land estimated that by planting soybeans, soil in this condition could be enriched considerably while producing fifty thousand nutritional units of soybeans. (usual disclaimer: I am completely making these numbers up. I have no idea how many servings of soybeans you might normally get in an acre.) But because the farmer plants corn in soil that is no longer suitable for corn growing, he is forced to use a great deal of fertilizer and he only ends up with twenty thousand nutritional units of corn, he should be called to explain his choice to a panel of his fellow farmers. If they find that he has misused the public resources entrusted to him and thus harmed the society’s food supply, the compensation he recieves for the year’s harvest should be cut in half.
Every effort must be made to aviod the monoculture situation currently in play in the midwestern United States. A combination of government policies and the influence of big agribusiness has rendered our food supply skewed in favor of an unhealthy diet and in danger of collapse if a serious disease affecting corn were to spring up. Farmers should be trained heavily in crop rotation and its use rather than simply fertilizing the soil to continue planting the same crop. Alongside that, consumers must be made aware of the true cost of the food they eat so that they are able to choose a more diverse diet without having to pay significant Consumption penalties simply because they are not eating the particular crop favored by the farm lobby.
And on that note of paying attention to the true cost of ones food, we get to animal farming. If there are controversies to be found about genetically modified plant crops, there are wars being waged right now over animal farming practices. And here we get into another area where it is difficult for me to be entirely objective. You see, I don’t like meat. I’m not a vegetarian as such, because I have no major objection to meat and I do eat the occasional chicken nugget when it’s been prepared the way I like it, but in general I could go the rest of my life without eating a bite of animal meat and be perfectly happy. So when I see the health and economic arguments against meat consumption, it is hard for me to defend meat eating as a public institution.
For every serving of meat consumed, there have been seven nutriciously equivalent servings of plant-based food consumed by the animal in question. That’s six servings of food wasted every time someone eats a serving of meat. The average American eats half a pound of meat a day. Speaking as someone who eats almost no meat and whose family eats very little meat, I am downright disturbed at the quantities of meat the regular carnivores must be consuming to bring the average that high. The human body simply did not evolve to eat that much meat. Our digestive systems evolved for millions of years on a diet consisting mainly of plants with occasional meat as it became available. In many cultures around the world, meat is still an occasional flavoring and almost never the main body of the meal. I’m mentioning all of this because I am about to suggest a set of standards for animal farming in a technosocialist society, and the initial reactions of most readers will probably be “But you’d never be able to produce enough meat that way.” I am not trying to come up with a system that will produce as much meat as Americans currently consume. I am simply trying to come up with a system where citizens will have access to meat as an occasional addition to a primarily plant based diet.
On to the actual plan. Basically, my twin goals for this plan are humane treatment of animals, and minimization of the use of societal resources. In a number of ways, these two can go hand in hand. It all boils down to a simple question: if all the humans disappeared tomorrow, would the animals survive? This is the question with which I draw a line between factory farming, which tends to treat animals very badly, and free range farming in which the animals are allowed to behave more or less naturally in an environment they are comfortable with. In the average factory farm, animals are penned up in extremely cramped conditions and recieve all of their food, water, and other resources through human intervention. Without the aid of humans, animals in those conditions would quickly starve. Contrast that with traditional ranching practices where cows wandered more or less as they chose across the plains of the West with human attendants there mainly to fend off predators and cattle theives. If those humans disappeared, a number of the cows would probably get eaten by wolves, but on the whole they would be unlikely to starve.
With that principal in mind, animal farmers should be trained in the natural behaviors of animals and in the ways that different species of animals can be sucessfully raised with minimal human interference in those behaviors. Most species raised for meat can be largely allowed to run wild, guarded from preditors but not otherwise restrained by humans. When they are old enough to be slaughtered for their meat, they can then be brought into a processing center and slaughtered as humanely as possible without as much risk of disease and contamination as modern farming techniques often create.
It is a bit different for species of animals raised primarily for their milk. Dairy species need to be milked fairly regularly, and this cannot generally be done in a fully free range setting. To this end, there will need to be organized and fenced dairy farms for cows and goats. But because dairy animals are a fairly renewable resource to meat cattle’s fossil fuel, it does not take nearly as great a quantity of cows to meet a society’s milk requirement as it does when each citizen is also eating half a pound of meat a day. By combining dairy farms with the established plant crop farms in a traditional three field system, the cows can help to enrich the soil of the farmers while grazing naturally on pasture rather than requiring resource-intensive grain feed.
I don’t want to make it seem like farming is something that can only happen out in the country. The housing system that allows individuals to claim exactly as much land as they want without being confined to predefined lots is likely to create odd pockets of unclaimed land perfect for community gardens. As long as crops and animals are looked after responsibly, there is no reason why they could not be kept in such vacant lots to provide local produce and a connection to the land to city-dwellers. Those who grow fruit, vegetables, or meat on their own land are of course entitled to their own produce without Consumption charge, or welcome to list it through the Market to earn Contribution. Anything that strengthens the connection between the food supply and food consumers is a good thing for a society.
Food production is one of the most important aspects of any large society. Surplus agriculture was one of the most important developments in the foundation of civilization as we know it today, and there have been few social theorists who failed to recognize how vital proper agriculture is to the stability of society. Unfortunately, they tended to go to one of two extremes: the entirely laizzes faire approach, leading to large agribusiness feeding cows to other cows and unleashing previously unthinkable forms of food contamination, or in the other direction towards Soviet collective farms, with beurocrats making farming decisions who had never seen a plow and whole peoples starving as a result. As in so many things, we need to try to chart a middle path. We need to make sure that our farmers are educated, and that they do not make choices that hurt society in the long run, but then we need to give them free reign to do as they see fit, and contribute food to society in the best way that they can.