Shifting to regenerative systems requires us to address farming.
What can we learn from small-scale farming, technology, agrarian knowledge and urban education in order to shift closer towards a regenerative system?
The Food: Bigger Than The Plate exhibition at the V&A Museum in 2019, showcased what they called “current experiments” in the food system. With works both speculative and commercial, the exhibit addressed what us as viewers — as consumers — think we know (knew), and what additional education was required to understand the challenges of the food supply chain.
This is part two in a four-part series Rethinking Waste that considers the four exhibit sections: Composting, Farming, Trading and Eating. This post considers what we can learn from small-scale knowledge in order to find alternatives to industrial technologies.
Find the previous story here: part one.
The current state of farming.
Farming shifted towards industrialisation over the last 200 years as machinery, inputs and labour became more readily available and cheaper. And though we rely on farms and farmers to sustain us with food, only 1.5% of the UK workforce works in agriculture. Does this mean that farming actually does not require so many workers here, or that our food is farmed by migrants who don’t come into these statistics? Or perhaps that we simply import most of it?
Small-scale farming is increasing — not for popularity, because the difficulty of purchasing land to do so is nigh impossible — but as a more efficient and transparent way to achieve food sovereignty. So those who believe, will try hard. However, whatever the farm size, it seems to be that farmers struggle through regardless; because of a land legacy, because of a need to steward… and since this 2019 exhibition was curated, the UK has undergone massive change due to Brexit, making it even harder to achieve profit from this way of work.
And still we come back around to the fact that we cannot survive without food producers.
“The world already produces enough to feed 10 billion people. A third of this food — 1.3 billion tonnes every year — is wasted.” — ‘Rewilding’ by Isabella Tree (Page 132)
During the exhibition I made notes on particular works that spoke to me, and have put them — along with some additional projects from the exhibition book — into sections: technology, agrarian knowledge and urban farming, and education. Part three of the Rethinking Waste series will consider local food design, traceability, understanding science, and shipping under the banner of Trading.
Technology.
“The unsung reality that the world is currently producting enough food to feed 3 billion more people than are alive has come about largley through remarkable advances in agricultural technology. New varieties of crops, GPS-guided precision sowing and fertilizing and hi-tech farm machinery have all contributed to enormously higher yields. / This abundance would astonish our ancestors.” — ‘Rewilding’ by Isabella Tree (page 135).
l’Atelier Paysan
l’Atelier Paysan is a French-speaking collective of small-scale farmers, employees and agricultural development organisations, gathered together as a cooperative offering a tool box of farmer-driven technologies and practices.
“Based on the principle that farmers are themselves innovators, we have been collaboratively developing methods and practices to reclaim farming skills and achieve self-sufficiency in relation to the tools and machinery used in organic farming.”
Mainstream agricultural research is increasingly oriented towards proprietary technology in service of large-scale monocultures over small resilient agribusiness. Collectives such as l’Atelier Paysan (and Farm Hack in the US) are connecting farmers with designers, engineers and thinkers to develop and share tools that will benefit those who intend to use them, rather than those simply intent on selling them. They are merging the hacker/maker movement with traditional farming skills to ensure a regeneration of resources; what is exceptional is that all resources are then open source, so you can download technical drawings and tutorials from their website.
MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg)
The Personal Food Computer, designed by a range of educators from across the US, enables “nerdfarmers and newcomers alike build for a wide range of scientifically rigorous, citizen-science experimentation”. It is a 3D printed box with open source making and assembly instructions that provides a closely monitored space for growing. While it is completely over the top for your everyday growing, it does open up research and experimentation to the everyday citizen as “controlled-environment agriculture”. There is an article from MOLD that gives a complete overview of the platform and outcomes.
Project Florence
Artist in residence at Microsoft, Helene Steiner developed Project Florence to highlight the communication we have with our natural environment through a reactive rudimentary conversation that comes about by attaching electrodes to plant tissue. “Plants synthesize a very large amount of information via electrical and chemical signals and deliberately make changes to themselves, their neighbors and the land nearby for their benefit”. It is a cute, mostly benign comment on bridging the natural and digital worlds through computation.
After watching Little Joe, a Little Shop Of Horrors-esque creepy consideration of plant sentience, this is why I say “mostly benign”. I feel slightly that putting plants in a scenario where they’re forced to talk in our language isn’t really getting to the brunt of mindset shift required to fully embrace their importance.
Agrarian knowledge and urban farming.
Farmers tend to be on the geographic margins and yet by bringing them into urban environments — by way of sharing their actual produce or their skills of production — then new narratives can form around what rural life is. It isn’t a remote space where nothing happens, but a place where wisdom of resilience is found, something that cities have shrunk from in the wake of convenience.
As food insecurity increases with supply chain disruptions caused by drought, floods, trade and labour, the more that small-scale food production is required.
HK Farm
Artist collective HK Farm occupied rooftop spaces around the city (a place that regularly ranks as number one in being the most unaffordable in city living) and worked with farmers evicted by development projects from the New Territories. In this way, marginalised communities are able to resist economic corruption that is forcing them off their land into supermarkets.
HK Farm can’t be found online now, but Rooftop Republic could be, so perhaps it has purchased. Rooftop Republic seems to operate as a manager of all urban growing spaces around Hong Kong.
Company Drinks
Drawing upon the “hopping” tradition of urban dwellers into rural spaces to forage and collect food, East London enterprise Company Drinks invites local residents to preserve their ancestral heritage through picking trips. The produce is transformed into seasonal drinks outside of a capitalist framework, with educational programmes, a community economy, and a collective desire running the show.
DIY food efforts
The Second World War was a time of community spirit, in a sense, because everyone was called upon to farm and grow for “the good of the village”. One such poster highlights the importance of food in a time of war, moreseo perhaps than ships; people can’t fight if they are not fed. This sentiment is coming to the fore again today in demand of seed sovereignty. Yet, another perspective is about farming every single scrap of land because that’s just the way things should be.
“The notion that we must work every inch of the land for our survival, ingrained in us since the Second World War, is highly emotive, and distressing images of famines in war-torn and politically unstable regions of the world daily reinforce the idea that there is not enough food to go round. / But this message does not reflect the experiences of farmers like ourselves, driven out of business by the global market — by low commodity prices resulting from subsidies and over-production.” — ‘Rewilding’ by Isabella Tree (page 132).
Fallen Fruit
I am writing this in 2022, way after the Food exhibition, but caught in a Cost Of Living Crisis due to energy price caps and rising inflation. There are fruit trees all over, and despite a lot being on privately-owned land, there is a community spirit brewing to allow gleaning to occur — both to save the mess of windfall, but to share out the goodies. Fallen Fruit is led by artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young who use fruit “as a material for interrogating the familiar” by investigating “interstitial urban spaces, bodies of knowledge, and new forms of citizenship”.
The exhibition hosted some of their London maps that highlight where fruits trees grow in or over public space, and are ripe for the picking. Imagine if this could be shared within neighbourhoods to avoid waste and to promote foraging.
“From their work, the artists have learned that “fruit” is symbolic and that it can be many things; it’s a subject and an object at the same time it is aesthetic. Much of the work they create is linked to ideas of place and generational knowledge, and it echoes a sense of connectedness with something very primal — our capacity to share the world with others.”
Education.
Our Daily Bread
This feature length film from Nikolaus Geyrhalter is an uncommentated look at the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming across Europe. It is harrowing and enlightening, taking the viewer on a harvest and processing of such industries as spraying sunflowers with pesticides, salt mining, cauliflower bagging, the scale of cucumber production, cow fertilisation for milk, fish skinning and apple picking. Because it isn’t narrated, the sounds are all-encompassing. At the V&A exhibition, there was a small area trellised off where everyone sat closely packed watching a small screen; this added to the discomfort of what you were watching, even when it was as benign a staff worker eating their lunch.
Studio Nienke Hoogvliet Bare Bones
The material researcher Nienke Hoogvliet and her studio explored the bone china industry, and whether today’s industrially-farmed animals are suitable for such a material. Subsequently, the Bare Bones project is an ongoing research project that compares the qualities of different types of bone derived from both organic and bio-industrially kept animals and how they function when produced from ash into bone china. Such research educates on the wider supply chain and economies affected when farming quality is reduced, along with supposing that the quality of the china reflects the quality of the animal’s life.
Planetary Community Chicken
I was frankly drawn to this one because of the close-up chicken portraits. But Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen has been cross-breeding chickens from different countries since 1999 for project Planetary Community Chicken (PCC), creating a collection of chickens with genetic diversity that creates translocal nutrition and income, so it’s bigger than just some fun photos of perturbed chickens.
“The introduction of a new ‘cosmopolitan genome’ to the local flock puts an end to the ongoing cycle of genetic erosion that results from local inbreeding and industrial highly efficient mono-cultural production. It promises greater resilience and adaptability. In turn, the local chicken provides familiarity and the necessary characteristics suited for the local environment, as well as resistance to domestic threats.”
The next article will consider Trading. ⇾ Follow to receive published stories by email.
Originally published in a longer format via my website — www.stephaniesteele.co.uk — on September 20th, 2022.
Stephanie Steele is the founder of Steele Studio, a space that educates everyday folk on the interconnectedness of our food, fibre and fashion systems through community courses and workshops. As an organic food grower and textiles sustainability specialist, she otherwise writes about art, textiles, plants, running and systems design.
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