Are we heading in the right direction?

🗣️ Lately, within the ecological small-scale farming movement, I have heard efficiency discussed with increasing frequency. Allow me to develop a line of reasoning on this topic. Bear with me, for this is a somewhat lengthy argument.

🏡 Many of us feel that, as smallholders, we struggle to remain economically viable because we lack access to economies of scale. Furthermore, we cannot—or rather, we choose not to—employ shortcuts such as synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, which would allow us to spend little and produce much.

🚜 We look at the big players, at the mechanised monocultures, and think they have it easy. Their hyper-simplified models appear more efficient and, on the free market, seem to hold a distinct advantage. Thus, to defend our complex, diversified models, we often appeal to externalities. We point out that we produce not merely food, but something healthier and more nutrient-dense, and that in doing so, we regenerate the soil, the ecosystem, and our communities.

❌ There is a major problem with this reasoning: it is fundamentally flawed. Large agricultural enterprises are not more sustainable than ours, even if we look solely at economic efficiency. They appear sustainable only because they are propped up by subsidies and favourable policies. Their model is inherently inefficient.

☝️ I am about to make a claim that may seem unjustified to most—but follow my reasoning, and I promise that if you wish, I will provide some supporting evidence by the end.

👩‍🌾 Small farms —where compost is shovelled by hand and cheap chemical fertilisers are replaced by manure or support plants managed with hard work and labour—could, in fact, be the most efficient model. Just as they are, without inventing extreme mechanisation or managerial acrobatics. All external conditions being equal, the economies of scale of large monocultures are not enough to compete with us. And were the market truly free and policies less centralised, this would be obvious to everyone.

💹 We often find ourselves in this blind alley: we must keep prices low to compete with mass distribution and conventional agriculture. And we fail. We believe the reason for our failure is that we are too small for economies of scale and that our methods require many (expensive) hours of labour rather than (cheaper) fuel.

⚙️ To solve this problem, we try to "optimise" our "businesses". We invent tools to work faster, we simplify agroforestry systems to avoid "wasting time pruning", we outsource the production of seeds and seedlings because doing it ourselves would cost more, and so on. In doing so, we slowly slide towards a version of industrial farming that is only slightly more ethical.

🏘️ We are fighting a phantom. Conventional prices are kept artificially low by politics and subsidies. And why do central policies favour immense mechanised monocultures? Because they are controllable. One need only read the historical arguments of James C. Scott in *Seeing Like a State*.

🏛️ In many cases—Soviet Russia is the textbook example, but also Tanzania, Burma, and many others—enforcing the standardisation and industrialisation of the rural world was an explicit tool of control. Those in power realised that these massive models were less efficient than smallholdings, yet they continued to subsidise them. Because control was more important than efficiency.

🌿 Personally, I am convinced the core is this: control and centralisation. Ecosystems function in a complex, distributed manner. Agricultural (and social) systems that mimic nature will always win out against centralised ones, simply because they follow the laws of physics and evolution.

🤑 By accepting the logic of the market, which leads us to believe we must become more efficient, we are internalising a very subtle form of oppression. We are exploiting ourselves in order to sustain a centralised model that can be governed from afar. We are trying to change ourselves because we have been convinced that *we* are the ones in the wrong.

🌱 Friends, colleagues, I invite myself and all of you to observe this fact. We can make our farms as efficient, optimised, and lean as we like, but this will not change the substance. We lose because the rules of the game are written to ensure we lose. If one day we cease to be "economically unsustainable", it will likely be because we have become controllable like everyone else, or because the entire social system has changed.

🤸‍♂️ I believe it is our responsibility to push for this systemic change, starting by challenging this tendency to streamline our farms at the expense of complexity.

⚔️ Efficiency is a weapon of class war. It serves to push the independent producer towards wage labour. In the case of agriculture, it is not only a weapon, but also a lie. If we want to survive, we must stop looking for validation in a market constructed in this way.

🥕 I am not saying we shouldn't improve our farms. But perhaps they should function for us—for our wellbeing, for our happiness. They must not align with criteria that appear necessary to balance the books but are, in reality, cogs in a machine of centralised control.

👩‍🌾 And likely, even this will not be enough—but that is another (purely political) story.