Unemployment, Figment of a False Economy

Am I the only one who sees the irony in today's jobs announcement (U.S. Economy Fails to Add Jobs)--with joblessness at 9.1%--and the erroneous assumption that what is required to fix the problem is renewed consumer confidence and spending? All the hand-wringing and anxiety about how to jump start growth is laughably myopic, when the prior question of whether growth (in GDP) is even desirable is ruled out of bounds at the start of the discussion. It is perhaps a symptom of our all-too-human hubris that we believe our growth potential to be limitless. (Only God is limitless.) To put it another way, "infinite growth in a finite environment is an obvious impossibility" (E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries, p. 51) Maybe I have been reading too many of the wrong kinds of economics books this summer, but I have to wonder whether an economy built on making work obsolete can produce jobs that are of any value. Must we really make it our goal to do everything by machine that can be done by machine?

In other words, can our current economy--which has disregarded the land, has emptied the rural areas of their population of caretakers ("Rural U.S. population now 16%, record low," Hope Yen, AP), and has turned everything from air and water to animals and people into mere factors of production--really produce meaningful work for people to do? Can our economy, with our current economic values ($$$ as the measure of all things), really produce jobs that help us grow as people? I will listen carefully to President Obama's job speech on Thursday, but I doubt I'll hear much about the foundational reasons for unemployment, especially about the direct correlation between our denigration of work (especially agricultural work of the sort that requires people's minds, backs, and hands to be fully engaged) and the lack of good work to do. I'll probably hear more of the same about the need for consumer demand to stimulate economic growth, increased infrastructure spending, increased governmental spending and hiring, and the like. Everything will be measured quantitatively and the assumption underneath the whole will be that infinite growth is possible in a finite world. Will he say anything about our empty rural areas and the need for people to return to these areas and take care of them? Of the value we must begin to place on a different kind of "hands on" food production? Will his program include the need to value work done by people, work that could be done by machines, but will not be because we value people more than we value GDP growth? I doubt it.

Here are a few questions from my summer reading that might move us back onto the right track. Does our work enable us to become fully human, to develop all of our God-given gifts and talents? Does it encourage us to work together, in and for community, to accomplish common goals? Does our work produce goods and services that people need for a full and abundant life, or are we merely trying to generate desire for what we have to sell (regardless of its intrinsic worth)?

Those are the sorts of questions I have been wrestling with this summer as I worked through three books that my readers will undoubtedly hear more about. I recommend each of them as food for thought and a radically different perspective on our current economic condition.

1) As already mentioned, E. F. Schumacher's heretical economics book, Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries.

2) Wendell Berry's What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, especially the essay entitled "What Are People For?" (pp. 105ff.)

3) And, finally, L. H. Bailey's, The Holy Earth, which I intend to share on a regular basis with excerpts on Tumbledown Farm (tumbledownfarm.com).

Planting an Urban Farm: The Time Is Here

There has been an unrelenting flood of news about land prices lately–moving in opposite directions, up and down at the same time–the momentum and tempo of which has been steadily increasing:

1) Foreclosures and property abandonment in cities and suburbs are at an all time high, while prices for development property/lots and single-family housing are falling (Targeted: Housing Blight ; City to develop own plan to revive neighborhoods).

2) The value of farmland is also at an all time high (largest one-year jump in 30 years, Farmland prices continue to rise; from $3500 to $4000 per acre in the past two years, Grain boom may spark rural revival; Rising prices will boost state’s economy, but consumers will have to pay more for goods).

At the same time that the city is asking “What can we do with all those abandoned homes?” (Olgen Williams, Deputy Mayor for Neighborhoods, to Star reporter Ted Evanoff), farmers are looking for land to buy or rent. As the NYTimes reports, there is big competition for new farm acreage at a time when the rest of the economy seems to be in a tail spin: “[a]t a moment when much of the country is contemplating recession, farmers are flourishing.” The 7000 foreclosures and abandonments in the city of Indianapolis alone are resulting in decreased tax base, a shortage of affordable housing (ironically), health and safety issues, crime and squatting. It seems to me that a better quality of life in city neighborhoods could be had by turning abandoned property into farmland and gardens. The good news is that agribusiness will not be able to even park, much less use, the John Deere 630T, 530 hp, with its 330 gallon fuel tank, on a lot of .1 or .3 acres. Using those city lots for urban farms and gardens would require shovels, hoes, rakes and other sustainable equipment. With “inputs” (chemical fertilizers) doubling in cost this past year, there would probably be less temptation to overuse those too.

I think the confluence of these two economic forces presents an opportunity for the niche urban micro farm.

It seems that I am not alone in thinking this is a good solution to some of our most intractable problems. Purdue Extension-Marion County announced in January that it had received a $10,000 grant from the Efroymson Fund, a CICF fund, for a pilot Urban Farm Project. In addition to problems of urban blight, The Urban Farm Project will address food insecurity on the Indianapolis near-east side. (Not far from Tumbledown Farm.) The community that this urban farm project will serve lost its only neighborhood full-service grocery store in the spring of 2007. Area food pantries have been stretched beyond their limit to respond. (As is also the case in Johnson county.) According to the extension newsletter, The Urban Farm Project “will help provide fresh produce by planting chemical-free urban gardens on two or three vacant neareastside lots. The produce generated from these lot gardens will be donated to a nearby food pantry for distribution to the community’s needy.” At the same time, the project “will also be an apprenticeship program for local high school students.” What a combination! (For more info about the Indy Urban Farm, contact Matthew Jose, Urban Garden Program Asst.)

It seems to me that this sort of model might also work in the “for-profit” world. Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, may show us the way with his banker-to-the-poor ideas about doing good by doing well in a distributed, small-scale way.

With food prices rising because of the spike in the cost of agribusiness commodities, I have been thinking about expanding Tumbledown Farm, ever so slightly. There is a little 40X136 lot (oh, about .13 acres, not enough for the big guys to notice, return on investment too small and too slow) about 9 miles from us that is listed with MIBOR for $2500. I bet it could be had for $2,000 in cash, and in three years could be producing $500 per year in filberts. A soil test, a little manual labor, and all the hazelnuts you can eat. (Or, for a little more time and labor, strawberries or raspberries, or vegetables of all sorts.)

What think you? Time for an urban micro farm? Want a share in this little agricultural and sociological experiment?

Tumbledown Farm

E. coli redivivus: Deja vu all over again in the city

Spinach anyone? Or perhaps you would prefer California scallions and green onions, or iceberg lettuce? As of today (12/14/2006), the FDA (citing CDC data) is reporting a total of 71 cases of E. coli infection in five states, with 53 hospitalizations in the latest outbreak. This time, rather than the fresh iceberg lettuce sold in bags at the grocery store, the agency for dissemination appears to have been the prepared entres of the fast food chain Taco Bell.

While not as large or devastating (yet, in terms of death) as the September outbreak in Spinach, this lettuce mess is another reminder that industrialized, centralized food production and distribution is a tragedy waiting to happen...yet again. (See Eric Schlosser's NYTimes editorial, "Has Politics Contaminated the Food Supply?" though his argument for an increase, and yet more centralization, in the bureaucratic regulation, inspection and oversight of our food--instead of a real solution, like returning to highly diversified, local food production--is short sighted.)

For Tumbledown's analysis of the causes and cures for this public health menace, see the previous five entries under "food safety."

Finally, Tumbledown has a bone to pick with the NYTimes guest blogger Steven Johnson (The Link Between Cities and Terror). Tumbledown tried to respond to Johnson's entry, but instead of being edited down, Tumbledown was edited out. So, here's the essence of the response: The solution to the problem posed by Johnson is the same as the solution to the increased industrialization and centralization of food production and distribution. Move (back) to the farm! ...but that's a solution Johnson has already dismissed as impractical or impossible. Too bad it is the only real solution proposed by any reader to Johnson's appeal for conversation.

In an earlier blog, Steven Johnson twice claimed that city dwellers subsidize the existence of farmers. ("[I]t is an undeniable fact that the big cities are footing the bill for the residents of so-called 'real America.' Blue states consistently pay more in taxes than they receive in federal assistance; the opposite is true for the red states." And "[i]t’s another thing for city dwellers to be lectured about urban depravity and the 'heartland' way of life, when cities are partially subsidizing that way of life." Real America, November 20, 2006)

Even if Johnson's numbers are accurate, the statistic lies. (The truth always depends on what you count and what you value.) For example, it does not "cost" much to drive a car, until you start to factor the cost of carbon emissions. (What will be the cost of keeping New York dry--or, more timely, post-Katrina New Orleans--when the waters start to rise from global warming?) Johnson forgets that in a debate about what is "real," food always wins. As Gene Logsdon says, "there's a difference between money growth and biological growth." (Living at Nature's Pace, "Traditional Farming," p. 86.) Crops do not grow at the same (exponential) rate as money. Or, to say it yet another way, real things do not grow at the pace of virtual reality. Real food for city people is subsidized because we do not "count" the costs of rural decline due to the industrialization of food production, or the real cost that "inputs" like fuel and chemical fertilizer extract from our environment. City food today is subsidized to a tune far greater than the difference between tax receipts and the government dole to states. It is subsidized, not by tax receipts from the city, but by borrowing from our future. People who live in cities cannot produce their own food--and they cannot live without it. So, what's the "real" value of stable rural towns and villages?

Let Tumbledown know when you city folk get hungry. Perhaps we country folk will be able to spare a green bean or two. ...just don't all come to dinner at once, please.

Tumbledown Farm

Too Dumb to Farm

Is Anyone Today Smart Enough to Farm?

Nobel economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) famously declaimed about an ordinary #2 lead pencil: "Look at this lead pencil. There is not a single person in the world who could make this pencil." (The PBS tv Series, "Free to Choose" [1990, Vol 1 of 5, "The Power of the Market."], available today on YouTube, but who knows for how long. Tumbledown has not quite figured out the relationship of that story to the following: Leaonard E. Read, "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read," December 1958.) Friedman could as easily have said that not a single person in the world today can farm. (Maybe that isn't true world wide, yet, but it is probably safe to say of the U.S.) The extensive, monocrop (or, to be generous, the two-crop rotation) agriculture of today, using genetically modified seed and industrial fertilizers, means that no one person could produce even a corn or soybean crop for two years running without the help of strangers thousands of miles away--and, of course, without the help of the oil-rich. The same can be said of animal raising. No single farmer keeps both boar and gilt, breeds boar to sow, cares for the pregnant pig until she delivers her litter of piglets, farrows, weans, and finishes the litter (much less butchering and preserving the hogs). And absolutely no one raises both crops and animals! That was Friedman's point, of course, that thousands of people across the world had to "cooperate"--but indirectly, with their interactions mediated by a market--to produce a pencil. Friedman celebrated the wondrous ability of the market to enable this faux cooperation (he says we might want to kill the person--of another religion, race, or ethnicity--with whom we cooperate to make a pencil, if we had to work directly with the person).

Tumbledown is not saying that the Nobel winner is wrong. (That would be dumb.) The market is indeed wondrous. But it isn't all good--nor the whole good, nor even the highest good. (See the critiques of Ray and Schaffer, Developing an Alternative to the Chicago School, Daryll E. Ray and Harwood Schaffer, UT, Ag Policy Analysis Center, Org. for Competitive Markets. Kansas City, MO, July 2003.) Markets also allow us to cooperate unwittingly in the creation of world-threatening warming, and to buy oil from the supporters of terrorists.

Just think about it: we can no longer even write--and writing is thinking--without globalization. No local community has the knowledge sufficient to produce it's own writing implements (quill and ink anyone?) much less its own food. Friedman was known as a champion of the individual's freedom to choose.

This is freedom? The dependence on a global market is truly freedom? We supposedly choose, when we are free to do so, what is in our best interest.

So, why will more than 50% of us "choose" to live in cities? According to Steven Johnson, we've gone from 3% of the population in cities (in 1880 at the dawn of the industrial age), to 50% (already, not waiting for 2007). "We are now a 'city planet,'" says Johnson, quoting Stewart Brand.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, why do we (dumb?) city slickers choose to eat fastfood?

And why has the Future Farmers of America become the FFA? (Times Article: Agricultural Mainstay Gets a New, Urban Face.) Because we are too dumb to choose farming. We prefer "agriscience," "biotechnology," and "turf grass management." Call us "farmers" and you may receive an old fashioned haymaker. Friedman was right that the economy is to blame. It is no coincidence that the "FFA" was first formed following the hand wringing of the 1920s to attract and keep farm boys on the farm by countering an inferiority complex. (Logsdon, "Our Hidden Wound," in Living at Nature's Pace, "I'm a hayseed, I'm a hayseed, and my ears are full of pigweed" or the struggle with the romantic opposite in Harvey Wiley's Lure of the Land.) Nor is it any wonder that the FFA name change followed immediately after a time of deep agricultural crisis. (The name changed in 1988; see this economic analysis of the period immediately prior: "Things got much worse when the dollar began to appreciate beginning in 1980. Exports fell in value by nearly one third by 1985, and with high interest rates, land prices could not be sustained. In the ensuing farm financial crisis, supply control interventions and farm program fiscal costs were driven to record levels." "Exchange rate effects on agricultural trade," Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Aug 2002. by David Orden.)

Maybe no one today is smart enough to live in the country, or free enough, to farm.

But we cannot end this entry on such a sour note. Maybe some of us are beginning to choose well, to live smart--by choosing and buying locally produced food. The NY Times calls the farmers who produce this food "counterculture farmers." So be it. Tumbledown calls them the real farmers. The farmers who say we can too make this pencil. You bet we can grow our own peppers, Milton, without shipping them from South America.

We will learn the utility of making our own pencils, and choosing to grow our own food and fiber.

We city slickers will have brains enough to farm.

I just know we will, Milton. How's that for confidence?

Tumbledown Farm