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@Ian M on TLN re small scale farming

Economics
#1

I am sorry to hear about your experience trying to set up a food business. It’s a very hard decision to wind things up. But, as you point out, you’re far from alone. We started a mushroom farm about 3 years back and went bust a couple months ago. Quite an experience… And a pretty costly one in the end. Took all of our savings. We’re selling off all our gear at the moment and trying to recoup something.

There are so many things wrong with the way the UK sources our food. We went down to the huge wholesale veg markets in London and spoke to a few local wholesalers here… It’s a nightmare.

Anyway, as an old friend of mine used to say - solidarity bro! Don’t let the bastards get you down. You’ve learned some crucial skills that will be needed soon enough as we progress into the polycrisis. It’s just that our current economic system is so skewed towards insanity.

If you want to chat to someone who’s walked a good part of the journey, drop me an email (or feel free to sign up here!).

5filters at protonmail dot com

Cheers

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#2

Oh dear, sorry to read that A, and for Ian M too.
This trend is pretty worrying, not just for those people sinking their time and money into low scale food production - the best kind I’m sure - but for the whole country. The UK seems to have got itself into a very fragile state, not producing nearly enough food despite there being enough land (in theory), and then sabotaging the supply of food from outside with high inflation, Brexit and wars against major food producing countries (maybe not in that order). Insane neoliberal glabalism is another threat. Looks like there’s climate change too (don’t have the links :slightly_smiling_face:) .
My main worry is there’s no real democracy to make necessary changes (eg land reform), and as the pressure ramps up, the public will be forced into whatever line TPTB want us to fall into.

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#3

Thanks ED!

It was a pretty stressful time overall. Growing things is fun, but turning it into a business is an ordeal and a half. Plus the timing was horrendous with energy prices, cost of living issues, sky-high commercial rents. To some degree we were insulated from climate change, as we were growing our mushies indoors, but we were cheek-by-jowel with farmers here in the fens who have had an absolutely shocker of a time with changing climate conditions. Whatever the current “official” 5F position, climate change is a real and present danger to farmers. One danger among many, I hasten to add. But one that won’t be fixed with an economic fix or a policy change.

Your main worry is spot on. There is no discussion, no momentum for changing the status quo. There are So. Many. Middlemen. between the growers and the consumers, that it’s just ridiculous. I really think that near term food insecurity is a guarantee in the near future for us. And I speak as someone who lives surrounded by farmers and a great farmers market.

We did meet some folks who were really trying to do good, but they have such an impossible uphill battle that every step is a challenge…

It was a shame. But at least I know how to grow mushrooms now… that may yet turn out to be a useful skill somewhere!

#4

Are they really space penis’s?

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#5

Lol!

To be honest, I think they might be. They’re definitely weird and wonderful.

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#6

It certainly would inject life into the panspermia theory

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#7

I echo @Evvy_dense sentiments.

There is a very interesting video on UK Column on just how one farmer has handled this kind of situation.

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#8

Thanks guys, I appreciate the kind words & solidarity. Likewise sorry to hear about Aly’s struggles with mushroom farming. Setting up the market garden has been the most money I ever spent out of my own pocket (albeit some from the bank of mum & dad), but we were able to live very frugally and postponed bigger infrastructure investments so we haven’t lost all of it. My sympathies for Aly’s situation - hope you manage to recoup some of it.

Organic veg growing generally has been having another awful year - OGA magazine conducted a survey at the start of the year looking at finances and burnout. Responses to the final question, ‘On the whole, how do you feel financially about the coming season, and beyond?’ were as follows:

  • Positive/hopeful 19.2% (11)
  • OK but not ideal (as long as nothing expensive breaks!) 29.8% (17)
  • Touch and go/tight/worried 42.1% (24)
  • Make or break year/very nervous/no future in growing 10.5% (6)

and to the question ‘What are the biggest obstacles to your business becoming stable and profitable?’:

  • Rising costs 60.7% (34)
  • Prices too low 57.1% (32)
  • Unavailability of funding/loans for expansion/capital equipment 44.6% (25)
  • Not enough customers 32.1% (18)
  • Limitation of farm size/setup 26.8% (15)
  • Lack of skilled workers 26.8% (15)
  • Lack of business experience 17.9% (10)
  • Slow/non-payment by customers 5.4% (3)
  • Personal capacity/getting older and running out of energy 3.6% (2)

With the rubbish weather across the board and ongoing cost of living crisis, I expect many/most of the people in the ‘touch and go’ and ‘make or break’ categories could be gone by the end of the year. I’m aware of at least 4 projects that have closed down already, and more will be in our situation of feeling like they at least have to try and sell the veg that they’ve sown and looked after earlier in the season, but come winter it’ll be curtains.

What gets me is the promise that organic/sustainable methods were going to be the future and conventional farming was going to be the sector struggling to stay afloat because of dwindling fossil fuels, diminishing returns on pesticides, soaring costs of transport and international trade etc. Turns out that was bullshit, and all organic was capable of within the constraints imposed by capitalism was supplying a premium ‘feel good’ product to the middle & upper classes, and the market for that would evaporate as soon as those people started to feel the pinch and cutting their costs like the working classes have been forced to do for decades.

Aly said: ‘You’ve learned some crucial skills that will be needed soon enough as we progress into the polycrisis.’ - that’s always been part of my calculation in taking this ‘career path’, if you can call it that. I knew that collapse was coming sooner or later and things would have to change in huge ways, so best to turn myself into someone with some vaguely useful knowledge and skills. I suppose that has been successful while other aspects have been failures. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re all compelled to abide by the insane logic of the system, no matter what we might secretly believe, and by the dominant way of seeing things I’m just another naive idealist who threw their money away on an unworkable vanity project, and this will be the first disciplinary step in turning me into another bloodthirsty capitalist like everyone else.

Unless there’s a revolution… Doesn’t feel like there’s much to lose at this point in time, though that could be another naive statement.

Anyway, I’ll leave it there!

cheers,
I

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#9

Hi Ian and welcome!

Yes that’s my worry, that one solution alone will be punted (happening already) with religious zeal, that suits the powers, and it will become regarded as ‘dangerous’ to challenge or question it, as we saw with covid.

Sorry you’ve had such a hard time of it, just when you decided to go all-in.

Thanks for posting the survey results. I wondered if, with hindsight, there was anything else you could have done that might have kept you in the game?

Best of luck with whatever you do next.

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#10

So much of what you say here resonated with my experience, Ian.

Our goal was to grow reasonably priced woodland mushrooms that are hard to find and a great alternative source of protein. Mushrooms are a great product in terms of water, energy, space and machinery. Very low tech, low impact and really good for you.

Sadly we were totally mismatched for the agri world we found ourselves stepping into… We got hit on at least three of the list of woes.

  • Our electricity bill + rent was totally crazy (>50p/KWH),
  • despite trying to sell better quality and cheaper than supermarkets, we were nowhere near the wholesale prices of mushrooms imported by the tonne into the UK
  • we just couldn’t get enough customers to justify our existence. We took samples all over cambs, lots of interest and almost no customers at all. We were approached by a wholesaler who wanted to buy from us to sell to the wholesale markets in London. So other wholesalers in Cambs could go to London buy our mushrooms and sell them to high end restaurants in Cambs. That’s three levels of separation between us and our customers (with each level adding their own markup).

Like you, we had a strong belief in the future of organic, local growing as a practical way to face the obvious problems that are barreling towards us. We were plugging into a local food hub project, working on a grant proposal to build a circular economy of local agri-business where waste was being recycled through the members of the project, trying to touch base with local veg box schemes, farmers markets etc. almost none of that worked out. The food hub project got it’s premises denied at the last minute, the circular economy thing didn’t win funding, the veg box schemes all went bust, and the farmers market was great but we could only do one a week otherwise we had no time to be on the farm…

The most depressing thing was how the whole system was set up to defeat low cost growing in the UK. No help on rents or electricity, Brexit totally screwing up our access to cheaper source material (but ironically in no way slowing down the importation of cheap mushrooms!) and UK based outfits doing what they could to gouge a living out of the smallish network of UK growers by charging exorbitant prices for things. Prior to Brexit we could get a bag of professional mushroom spawn for 10-13 euro depending what variety. Post Brexit I was paying 25 quid for the same bag… When I queried the price,the answer was - you should sell these speciality mushrooms for £40/kg.

Eh??

All this just meant that there was no way to be competitive. Just the cost of the inputs were way to high.

Luckily I was able to plug back into my old world of mathematical software development. So that’s what I’m doing while we try to sell off whatever gear we bought.

Anyway. That’s a part of the story. There’s so much wrong with how we are set up for food… I have to believe that we’re going to take a good long look at this eventually!

Right. That’s a long post. It’s nice to touch base with someone who’s also been trying to walk this path.

Cheers
A

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#11

Thanks ED,

Not sure what the ‘one solution’ to the failures of organic/small scale/fruit & veg growers would be. I suppose for farming more generally you’ve got the people pushing lab grown food (sic) and eating bugs, but I don’t get the impression those options are anywhere near the point where they can be rolled out at scale or make a profit. An engineer investigating the cost-competitivity of lab-grown meat substitutes concluded that:

the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. […] it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”

Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.

“And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos."

And it has been estimated that the bacterial protein favoured by George Monbiot in ‘Regenesis’ would take ‘the world’s entire current solar energy consumption more than twice over to produce sufficient protein globally’ - AND he appears to have overestimated the productivity per kWh of the process considerably. Not the 18kWh/kg figure he cites, more like 65kWh/kg.

Not to say that they won’t try, or there won’t be some new efficiencies brought to it over time, but it seems like a non-starter despite all the hype.

Anyway, thanks for the sympathies and best wishes. As to whether we could have done anything differently, not really - the weather and broader economic factors are out of our control. We could probably have put our prices up more than we did, and if we were more outgoing people or better at marketing could have got more regular customers. But that doesn’t solve the limitation on what you’re able to grow from the land, and without the ability to get multiple crops per bed during a season it means dramatically increasing the area of land under cultivation, meaning a field scale, tractor-based operation that isn’t really appropriate for the site. Then you have do go through and weed it all, build more infrastructure for storage, processing etc. Without an army of volunteers it would quickly become too much for the two of us to handle.

Iain Tolhurst, one of the organic bigwigs who has been doing it since the 70s, recently lamented the impossibility of getting started out in growing nowadays compared to when he started. He reckoned about 90% of new growers would fail within the first couple of years, and that the sector was rapidly becoming a mix of older, more established projects that were just scraping by and a rapid turnover of inexperienced newcomers which would fail to supply the next generation of viable growing businesses. Ie: a recipe for extinction in the mid- to long-term. Not pretty…

But as Aly says, the skills are there, and I’m sure I’ll find some way to put them to use in one context or another. They tried a Diggers revival in 2012 to coincide with the Magna Carta anniversary celebrations, which got evicted after a couple of years. Probably about time to give it another go though!

cheers,
I

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#12

(Not allowed to include more than 2 links per post: archived Diggers2012 website here)

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#13

Thanks for sharing your story, Aly, I didn’t know a lot about mushroom growing apart from a few chats with people who supplied us with compost. A huge pity that the food hub project wasn’t able to get off the ground - it’s such an obviously good idea bringing so many different benefits to local people that you’ve got to wonder why local govt wasn’t all over it, doing everything it could to make the thing succeed. It’s maddening to have all these enthusiastic and skilled people willing to work for not very much money at all in order to set up something good, and it just withers away for lack of support while the unsustainable supermarket/megafarm globalised model is drowning in subsidies, unfairly tilting the table in their favour. Really seems that the govt’s role is to prevent good things from happening. Even Clarkson discovered that, with however many millions he was able to pump into his projects.

That’s why it’s seeming more & more to me that the only way forward is through deliberate attempts at creating subsistence communities on occupied land. They closed off all the other possibilities for shifting the culture towards something genuinely sustainable so f* them, we’ll have to do it for ourselves and let them drown in their own sh!t.

cheers,
I

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#14

Hi Ian

That’s fascinating about the Diggers good luck if you follow in their footprints.

I fully agree about the need for much more involvement…I think everyone who is able should at least contemplate making some effort to figure out how to grow some things; it’s not much use that spuds are/used to be 20p a pound if there’s a long term shortage and/or the prices are through the roof. In the event of a food crisis, there probably wouldn’t be enough on supermarket shelves to go round, anyway.

Thanks for these interesting counter-points to the increasingly punted ideas of bugs and fake food. I hadn’t seen much about these; though I did feel that relying on ever increasing intensification is the wrong way to go. Considering the uncertainties it should be a last resort, not the main plan. It’s an example of ‘one solution’ (sorry, by that I meant kind of one solution for each problem) that is being crafted to suit the oligarchs.

You said it was the worst growing weather and we’ve seen evidence of this - was the failure due to crops not growing in the conditions, or destruction of growing crops.
Would this year’s bad growing conditions threaten small production by people that is for their own use. I realize that won’t solve the whole problem, especially if conditions limit availability of usual supplies. But it’s a question that seems relevant to me, as I’ve been seeing people paving over their lawns (and then giving them the short back and sides treatment every Sunday) for years.

Cheers
ED

#15

No worries, ED, I see what you mean about the pushing of one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’. Mad geoengineering projects as last ditch attempts to avert runaway climate change will be another one to watch out for in the years to come. Desperate people are capable of doing crazy things, and the same is true on the societal level IMO.

re: growing conditions threatening small subsistence-oriented production I would have to say yes it would based on my experience here in Scotland. It’s marginal for decent veg growing in the best of years, we’ve come to realise, but the cool weather, low amount of sunlight put a damper on plant growth across the board. The cattle farmer down the road said that even the grass had stopped growing at one point in late spring/early summer, so it would have affected traditional subsistence farming too, organised as it was mainly around dairy from cattle and a few grain crops (later potatoes). Other factors come into play, like whether you have access to fish, wild game, foraged wild plants etc. Also whether you had supplies left over from previous harvests. As I understand it though, famines were made worse historically by the fact that peasant farmers were required not just to feed themselves but also the parasitical upper classes, urban centres, and industries, with growing food for your own consumption being something that happened after you had grown enough to sell, paid all the feudal dues and/or taxes and rent. In the era of global trade people don’t starve because they don’t have access to food; they starve when they don’t have access to money with which they can buy food. Not to say that subsistence-oriented cultures never face starvation, but it was probably rarer without those extra burdens added on top. And basically unheard of where there was an intact ecology and a strong element of hunter/gathering in the subsistence base.

That’s pretty far away from where we are now in most of the western world though!

cheers,
I

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