Small Farms Build Community. Industrial Farms (often) Don’t. Here’s why.

Two pictures. Two farms. Right beside one another. My neighbour, the Bank (a well known Irish Bank), farms spruce for wood pellets, construction timber and fenceposts. I farm wildflower meadow for sheep, pigs, turkey and goats. That they are different is obvious. Why they are different is key.

Both farms provide for basic human needs. Food in my case, or warmth, shelter, and building resources for the Banks’ farm. Both provide an income for the owner. Both are farms. And we have to think of them as farms to understand them.

Small farmers live where we work. And we love where we work. We live with our choices, and their results and consequences. In the land we live in. The environment we depend on. And the communities we work in. What we do shapes all three. We live with and in all three. That’s what community is. People working and living together, in a shared environment, where the choices we make shape and effect each others lives.

That connection, the community it fosters and the culture and identity that flows from it can grow. It can become something. It can be what binds people together. It can become the culture of a place. The sharing of food in the place where it is grown with people who love both can become something bigger. It can become an idea. That happens with small farms. With people knowing one another. If your food comes from where you live, you tend to care about it. The people growing and selling it tend to care about you. Eating and Farming become ways of caring for your locality. And from that comes pride. And from that comes tradition, and ritual. And community. And culture. Parma Ham. Bellota. The Tea Ceremony. Clonakilty Pudding. Waterford Blaa. All rituals of community and identity expressed with care in food.

Farmers here are often proud. Of many things. The local GAA team. Their roots. Rosettes won at the show. That Ram with the straight back and perfect colour. But they are proud of, as they often say “what we have”. “People, if they knew it, wouldn’t believe what we have, they’d be amazed”. Spoken with pride. Proud of the sound of the cuckoo in spring. Of the spray of hawthorn. Of the pine marten in the woods. Of the woodpecker that hunts in the alder copse in the low field. Proud of the sound of its drumming in Spring. Worried of they can’t hear it. Relieved when you whatsapp that it’s been hunting along your treeline. There’s barely a farmer who doesn’t stop to let the swallows sink in. They are here. again. At last. Things are right. Weather, climate, seasons are changing. But they are here. Again. Where they should be. At last. The can feel the rightness of it. Community, care, and the relationships between people that foster them.

This too, this pride in place and what we have and this sense of the rightness of things, that connection to land and what lives in it comes with living, working, eating and being, there.

The Bank are absentee farmers who hire an asset management company who hire a forestry company who sell harvesting licences to global harvesting companies, to ensure a regular predictable return on an investment. The rightness of a thing doesn’t matter. The feeling of the swallow returning doesn’t matter. And even if it did you wouldnt see them and it still wouldn’t matter because the Bank are not there. The neighbours don’t matter. You don’t share space, time, resources, environment, views, scenery, air quality or community with them. The consequences don’t matter as they are far away, someone elses management problem, and never, ever seen. There is no community. No culture. No common goal. No shared environment. They don’t walk past hedges, treelines, badger setts, swallow nests, pine martens homes, red squirrel habitat or wildflower lawns that have been ripped up.

The Spruce forestry is a farm. But of a different type. It is land owned by a bank, who hive it’s management off to an asset company, who delegate it’s management to a forestry company who sell it’s harvesting rights to whoever will pay. There is no community. No connection. There is no ground for culture to grow from. There is no human scale. The lots of land, and money are so large that the human dimension is lost. Land is managed as an asset, consequences measured as returns. Producer, owner, harvester and consumer are divided from each other by layers of law, distance, time and economics. I feel no more for my Ikea shelving than I do for the traffic bollard at Tesco’s car park. And I rarely think of the forest my Billy Bookcase is made from or the people who live, hunt, work, farm, walk, live and love there. Ikea, industrial farming, Tesco and Spruce Forestry are all run the same way. Economies of scale whose sole purpose is to generate income from remote resources where cheapness trumps consequences.

Closeness to the food you eat creates culture. Closeness to the people you grow food for creates responsibility. Culture breeds pride. Responsibility breeds community. The harvest of culture and pride is care. That closeness to each other, farmer and consumer, can be physical, you buy direct from the farmer in a market or from shop. It can be remote. You order direct from a farmer over twitter, read a farm blog. You buy from a farmers market. You follow your veg grower on Instagram. You go glamping on a farm. You tweet pictures of your flock. You YouTube about the harvest. You invite people on farm visits. You ask your greengrocer, where the food comes from. Who made it. How. But it’s result is care, and careful management, and a culture of food, of place and of shared values, consequences and community.

Farming is at it’s best when it is done amidst, and as an engine of, community. In places where farmer and eater are connected by the common currency of a shared and valued food culture, the choices farmers make are part and parcel, in a real sense, of identity, of the story people tell of themselves, of how a place thinks of itself. In places where farmers, eaters, livestock, and land are all jumbled together messily into each others stories, farming, and people and land are all the better for it. There are places where this is so. I think of Modena with barrels of Balsamic in the attic. Or my Spanish students arguing passionately about frittata or whose ham is better. Proud of their Black Pigs. French cheese. Czech Plum Brandy. Butchers, greengrocers, small farms, markets, festivals, local restaurants are where food culture lives.

Supermarket aisles and chain restaurants are where food culture goes to die. Gradually. Sucked clean of the connections that make of food culture a vital, living, breathing beautiful thing. Connections that put us right up against the consequences of our decisions on people we have relationships with. They are spaces where we replace the jumble and awkward clutter of human interaction with convenience. But it is in that jumble that pride and culture are born.

We are losing our small farms Our human scale agriculture. And the community and culture that comes with that. And we are replacing it with massive food conglomerates who are as removed from our lives, and the consequences of their choices as you can get. We are replacing it with investors who have no relationship with ourselves, our homes, culture, context and consequences, and who manage our resources as assets to return on.

If farmers and eaters want a fairer food system, it is only by creating common cause and the culture that flows from that that we can meaningfully achieve it. To have a farm system and a food culture that what can be proud of, that we can invest our sense of self into, that can enrich our culture, our environment and our lives, we can only do it jointly.