The Woodcutter's Dull Ax

If the ax is blunt and one doesn't sharpen the edge,

then he must use more strength;

but skill brings success.

- Ecclesiastes 10:10, World English Bible

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I signed up for a paid audiobook subscription during the waning months of the COVID lockdowns.  For the price of my subscription I get one credit per month which I can apply toward a free download of an audiobook, and I also get audiobooks at reduced prices if I decide I want more than one new audiobook per month.  At first I used my audiobook credits to obtain downloads of fiction (particularly Chinese science fiction), but lately I have been sampling some nonfiction.  So it was that this past month I stumbled across a book called Rest by an author named Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.  

As advertised on the audiobook website, Pang's book invites us to "Sit back and relax and learn about why overworking and under resting can be harmful to yourself and your career."  And the website also informs us that "If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves."  Such statements intrigued me precisely because for the last seven months, I have been working like a dog.  While there are elements of entrepreneurship which I have enjoyed, overwork has not been one of them.  So I gave Mr. Pang's book a listen or two to see what I could learn.  Below are some of my observations gleaned from my listening.

First, a few observations about Mr. Pang.  It seems that he is a member of that sector of the economies of the First World known as the "advice industry."  This "industry" includes many "content" producers whose advice is aimed at aspirational members of the middle and upper middle class.  Some of their offerings are well-researched and contain original and valuable insights, but other offerings have a familiar snake-oil smell to them.  (Think of Norman Vincent Peale for an early 20th-century example, or Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss for a couple of modern-day examples.  Note also the dissatisfaction which some people are now expressing toward the advice industry as they see its use as a tool of capitalism.)  

But let's get to Pang's book, shall we?  Rest is laid out thus: Pang's thesis statement is set forth in the introduction and the first two chapters.  Then the next six chapters describe the day-to-day setup of the  habits of rest in the lives of elite creatives, drawing on a number of historical examples.  The last four chapters describe the ancillary activities of recreation of these creatives, some of which can be fit into a day-to-day schedule, and some of which are larger activities which take creative people out of their daily routines for a while.

Pang's thesis statement is something that I think most reasonable people would agree with, namely, that appropriate rest is the necessary precondition for excellent work.  When we don't rest appropriately, our work suffers.  As he says, "I argue that we misunderstand the relationship between work and rest.  Work and rest are not polar opposites...Further, you cannot work well without resting well."  Pang rightly points out the contrast between the harried lives of most employees (especially "knowledge workers") and their employers versus the unhurried pace of the lives of the people who were responsible for some of the greatest discoveries and innovations of the modern industrial era.  

Focusing more closely on the harried lives of workers, Pang says, "As a result, we see work and rest as binaries.  Even more problematic, we think of rest as simply the absence of work, not as something that stands on its own or has its own qualities....When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it.  Americans work more and vacation less than almost any other nationality in the world..."  Finally, Pang's thesis statement contains the following words: "Rest is not something that the world gives us.  It's never been a gift...If you want rest, you have to take it."

A problem arises when we move from Pang's thesis statement to the chapters describing the day-to-day routines of history's greatest creatives.  The problem does not lie in the efficacy of the routines themselves.  In particular, the observation that the best creatives spend no more than four or five hours a day working deeply on their craft has been validated by the research of K. Anders Ericsson and others who studied the role of deliberate practice in producing expert performance.  Similarly, there is abundant evidence for the benefits of establishing morning routines, taking daily walks in order to clear one's head, taking naps during the workday in order to recharge, and getting enough sleep each night.  The research cited by Pang also validates the larger ancillary activities of recreation which he describes in the latter part of his book.  (I really, really like the idea of sabbaticals!  I've got to get me one of those things...)

The problem with incorporating these things into the daily lives of a significant number of workers is that they fly in the face of the culture of late capitalism which has been created and is being maintained by the world's richest people at the present time.  Therefore, these habits and practices are countercultural - and those who seek to practice these habits expose themselves to the possibility that they will suffer for trying to do such things.  Take doing only four or five hours of deep, focused work per day for instance.  I can truthfully tell you that I have never worked for an employer who would have agreed to such an arrangement.  From the time I obtained my bachelors degree until the time I quit my job to start a business, every employer I have ever worked for insisted on at least 40 hours a week, broken down into at least eight hours every day.  In those workplaces where the technical staff were unionized, we were allowed only two ten-minute breaks per day and one 30-minute break for lunch.  In the non-union places, 40 hours a week was not enough.  I remember one coworker of mine who worked 50 to 55 hours a week on a regular basis and who was kept alive by regular doctor's prescriptions.  I worked for another office whose local client base was shrinking due to mismanagement, and whose bosses offered me the chance to keep my job only if I was willing to travel extensively.

Take naps also.  For a long time employers frowned upon employees sleeping anywhere within sight of their managers.  This meant that if you needed a nap, you sometimes had to get into your car and drive a couple of blocks away from the office to sleep.  Admittedly there has been something of a shift in corporate culture over the last decade, in that a number of corporate offices now have designated "wellness rooms" where workers can retreat in order to decompress.  However, the first time I worked in a place that had a wellness room, I was told that the big boss in my office would allow employees to use the room as long as they didn't sleep in there.  This restriction applied even at lunch.  What a doofus!

In other words, I don't think Pang's book adequately accounts for the functional, structural factors which have driven rest from the lives of many American workers.  To be fair, the introduction of his book does mention the structural factors of "automation, globalization, the decline of unions, and a winner-take-all economy."  He also mentions the continuous increase in living expenses (especially housing expenses) which makes people hostages to longer hours and longer commutes.  But the tone of his book - especially of the introduction - implies that our failure to engage in the kind of deep rest he advocates is a result of our own ignorance or wrong attitudes, as exemplified in the following quote: "When we define ourselves by our work, by our dedication and effectiveness and willingness to go the extra mile, then it's easy to see rest as the negation of all those things...When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it."

Because the radical adoption of the habits of the creatives cited by Pang is such a threat to the present order (especially in the U.S.), I think Mr. Pang fudges a bit in his advice to people who want to apply these habits to their own lives.  When I say that he "fudges", I mean that he sometimes takes the radical embodiment of a radical idea and whittles it down to a size and shape that does not threaten the established order.  For instance, in his chapter on sabbaticals, the radical idea of taking extended time off is weakened by citing modern executives who take two weeks off per year and label these breaks as sabbaticals.  I had to laugh at this, as the first job I had after I served in the military as a young adult was an assembler at a defense plant.  The plant was a union shop and new employees got only two weeks off, plus one week of sick leave.  Big whoop-de-doo.  There are other examples of what I would consider fudging in Pang's book, but if you want to spot them, you'll have to read the book.  

A couple of last observations.  In his choice to cite those creatives who were gentlemen of means in Victorian England, Pang elides the fact that these people had time to set up their lives for maximal recreation and deep work precisely because they were the beneficiaries of a social and economic system which offloaded their dirty work onto the less fortunate members of the British caste system.  This point is made abundantly clear by the description of the lives of coal miners in George Orwell's book The Road to Wigan Pier.  I am particularly struck by one of the Victorian sons of privilege whose life was mentioned in Pang's book: Sir John Lubbock.  It is amazing to me that Pang cites him as a beloved reformer who saw the benefit of rest for all of British society when one considers that his "Early Closing Bill" restricted the working hours of British youth under 18 to no more than 74 hours per week.  Consider that this still adds up to over ten hours a day, 7 days a week.  What a joke of a reform.

However, having made my objections, I still think that the central idea of Pang's book has a certain merit.  (I'd also like to mention that Pang seems to be trying to organize a movement for good in this country.)  In particular, I agree with the idea that there is a certain cluster of optimum life arrangements which must be sought by those who desire to do groundbreaking intellectual work.  And I'd like to suggest something which was not found in Rest: namely, the idea that America is suffering an innovation crisis (see this also) precisely because the overlords of modern American society have driven rest out of the lives of most workers by making those optimum arrangements for rest impossible.  I think that will have consequences rather soon.

The Exports of Grandma's House

In a previous blog post I mentioned my discovery of Chinese science fiction and how it has become a manifestation of a new cultural soft power.  As part of that discovery, I stumbled a few months ago on a delightful short story titled, "Summer at Grandma's House" (" 祖母家的夏天"), written by Hao Jingfang (郝景芳).  (See this also to get a fuller picture of Ms. Hao.)  The story is ostensibly about the process by which a young college student's struggle to identify his future direction in life is resolved during the student's summer stay with his grandmother.  The grandmother is not the central figure in the story.  However, she does play a major role, and thus we get a rather full glimpse of what sort of person she is and what she does with her life.  It is that glimpse which attracted my attention to the point that the young man's story became almost secondary to me.  For it is the picture of Grandma that illustrates some of the themes which my blog has addressed over the last four or five years, and especially during the last two years.  So let's go to Grandma's house together, shall we?

First, although it's only incidental to the story, let's take a look at the house itself.  The story describes the house as a "little two-story bungalow...at the foot of the mountain, its red roof hidden in the dense treetops."  As I tried to visualize the scene, the word "bungalow" caught my attention, as this was a word which I had heard in conversation from time to time over the years, yet whose definition had never been explained to me.  (To add a bit of confusion, it appears from Google's translation algorithm that the original Chinese phrase could also be translated "villa."  But in my mind, that translation ruins the picture somewhat.  What do computers know anyway?)  So I looked up "bungalow"... and discovered that the word has more than one definition.  The definition I liked best (which also matches the description of the house in the story) is "a small house or cottage that is either single-storey or has a second storey built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas." - Wikipedia.  Think of something like this, except that the roof color is wrong:

A rather ordinary house, no?  But let's consider the things Grandma did in that house.  For Grandma was a biologist/biochemist who had been a college professor before her retirement and who now had a lab on the second floor of her house.  In other words, although the house looked quite ordinary, there were extraordinary things going on inside it.  The manifestation of hidden extraordinariness extended even to the furnishings of the house, whose front door opened by pushing on the side closest to the hinges and farthest from the doorknob, where the oven looked like a refrigerator, where what looked like a table lamp was actually a mousetrap, ...

The extraordinariness of Grandma is seen most strongly in her lab and the experiments she does with things such as transposons and photosynthesizing bacteria.  Her research has implications and consequences which I won't get into now, in order not to ruin the story for anyone who wants to read it.  But there are high-level conclusions which we can take from Grandma's work.  Here is a woman who has devoted herself to learning to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, as Titus 3:14 says.  Moreover, the work she does requires the possession of rare and valuable skills.  As Cal Newport has pointed out in his books So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work, it is the possession of rare and valuable skills that meet genuine needs that gives the possessor a certain social, cultural, and economic power.  (Disclaimer: although I have enjoyed Cal Newport's early work and writings, I think he has begun to go off the rails a bit during the last few years.  Being friends with people like Joe Rogan is morally sketchy in my opinion, to say the least.)

Therefore we see that the cultivation of rare and valuable skills in the pursuit of beautifully good work is the means by which people build their own internal power, and it is the means by which communities and peoples - especially those peoples who have been historically oppressed - build their own collective power.  And this power can be built in small spaces and ordinary settings like the second floor of an elder woman's small bungalow.  In fact, it can be built in spaces even tinier and more prosaic than this.  (Want examples?  See this and this.  That second link is from a Filipina accountant and describes her home business space.)

The cultivation of this kind of power is a big step toward individual and collective self-sufficiency.  But when we think of self-sufficiency, we must shed a bit of cultural baggage that has been introduced into the societies of the developed world over the last decade or so.  I no longer believe that self-sufficiency is achievable by going entirely off-grid, due to the fact that we must all live in societies whose members must each pay some of the collective cost of maintaining those societies.  Thus, I am not really impressed by the late Jules Dervaes and his family, nor am I impressed with their "Path to Freedom" house and the rather extravagant claims they have made about their lifestyle - a lifestyle which they attempted to support by trademarking the English phrase "urban homestead" in order to force people to pay royalties to them.  Moreover, I have never really believed in the claims of people like Tim Ferriss who boast of being able to achieve retirement before 40 by building passive income streams.  The promise of "passive income" seems immoral to me, as does the type of character who chases after such a promise.  Such characters frequently get taken to the cleaners during their quest.  (See this for a humorous take on the subject.  And don't quit your day job!)  Sooner or later, both people and societies come to realize that those who have actual power are the people who produce valuable things that people actually need.  This, for instance, is why nations dominated by "service economies" are potentially weaker than nations that are dominated by manufacturing economies, unless the services offered support the production of beautifully good and necessary work.

Therefore, those of us who want the power we need to live unmolested in a hostile world must give ourselves to learning, and to self-education when other avenues of education are denied us.  As the Good Book says, "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work..."  We may have to give up a number of evenings and weekends in our pursuit.  And we must learn to protect the fruits of our labors in order to make sure that those fruits are not stolen from us.  For we live in an age of dishonesty.  Therefore we must learn to be strategic.

Capitalists and Cheapskates on Craigslist

In these days of economic turmoil, in which large employers are abandoning any sort of commitment to the well-being of their employees, it is not surprising that many people are considering self-employment. Self-employment is attractive for a couple of reasons. First, a savvy entrepreneur can become independent of fickle, unreliable employers. A successful small businessman or businesswoman can therefore earn a living while being free from the fear of “downsizing.” Second, self-employment is “controllable,” at least on paper. That is, there need not be some external agent such as as boss forcing the self-employed person to work like a dog for sixty or seventy hours a week, while barely earning a living wage. In principle, the self-employed person should be able to set his or her own hours in order to live a manageable life.

The ability to form and use networks is a key for the self-employed. Not very long ago, such networks were built out of relationships – between service providers and satisfied customers, between service providers and trusted suppliers, between friendly fellow practitioners. Such networks were, in a sense, “owned” by all the users thereof. Now, such networks have largely become electronic. Everyone advertises and talks to each other on line these days.

It is instructive to trace the migration of relationship-building from the physical world to the cyber-world. There are several good examples of this from recent history. One such example is Craigslist, which started out simply as one means out of many by which a collection of friends with similar interests networked with each other. (See Craigslist from Wikipedia.) Craig Newmark's e-mailed list of things of interest to him expanded beyond his circle of friends as friends talked with other friends, and soon his list was a big, popular thing with the potential to make a lot of money for its owner.

For things that have no monetary value, or for the sort of “garage sale” things that people sell or trade, Craigslist still has value in connecting ordinary people with ordinary people. But while in its earlier days, Craigslist was a good way for small-scale entrepreneurs to connect with each other, it no longer seems very useful to the self-employed.

The problem is the capture of Craigslist and other on-line venues originally created for ordinary people to connect with each other. Nowadays, most of the people who advertise for jobs or offer services on Craigslist seem to be large corporations, or are start-ups backed by lots of venture capital from heavyweight “investors” looking to corner the market for some service. Thus many of the things that could at one time be done by ordinary people in order to get by without a regular job have now become commodities meted out to the public via growth capitalists. Those who are trying to escape from being turned into commodities are discovering that even self-employment is now being commodified.

There are many signs of this commodification. Are you smart? Did your education give you a solid background in mathematics? Now that your office job has dried up, you may be thinking, “Hey, I could tutor high school kids in math!” But beware of trying to drum up business via Craigslist. Tutor Doctor, Complete College Prep, and a host of other big, multi-state services will eat you for lunch if you try to set up as an independent tutor. Of course, you could always surrender and go to work for one of these outfits. They typically charge around $45 an hour for tutoring – but they will pay you around $20.

Let's say that tutoring isn't your thing, but you have a strong back, work hard and like cleaning houses. I know people who put themselves through college by cleaning houses, and they worked as independent small businesspersons. They couldn't do it today – not with people like The Cleaning Authority, who have massive advertising budgets and massive budgets for placating the legal system. Do you like kids? Want to be a nanny? Beware, because there are venture capitalists trying to capture the nanny market as well. In fact, at least one firm which has advertised on Craigslist offers to meet all your domestic needs – housecleaning, tutoring and nanny services – all from one provider. How convenient.

The commodification of things which used to fall under the category of self-employment has led to other harmful outcomes. Those who do domestic work or tutoring for these firms must increasingly submit to onerous and invasive background checks and must provide extensive references, often for jobs that don't pay more than $12 an hour. (A lot can be said about the burgeoning “background check” industry, by the way. More on that in another post.) This has emboldened private parties looking for services to ask for the most outrageous things while offering the most outrageously cheapskate compensation. Just this past week I read an ad posted by someone in Lake Oswego (a rapidly evaporating enclave of people who once thought they were rich) asking for a tutor to provide after school instruction and supervision to a couple of kids. The prospective tutor was to provide an extensive list of references for this most important job – in exchange for $5 an hour plus gas money!

The commodification of self-employment has emboldened some people who are as yet untouched by our ongoing economic collapse to try to use their fellow men and women as slave labor. These people are wanna-be capitalists who think they can get something for nothing from their fellows just because times are hard. So they post ads on Craigslist for “nannies” and “tutors” who must provide multiple references and submit to a background check and fingerprinting in exchange for chump change, or for nothing more than “free room and board.”

Self-employment is a valuable and viable means of coping with hard times. But I think that those who want to make a successful go at it will need to re-learn the art of building networks of relationship outside of the Internet. Networks of personal relationships cannot be easily co-opted by capitalists and cheapskates.

Leaving the Cubicle for the Farm (In The City), Part 2

This post is part 2 of a transcript of an interview I did three weeks ago with Josh Volk, urban farming consultant and proprietor of Slow Hand Farm. Part 1 can be found here. For the sake of continuity, I have included all of Part 1 as part of today's post.

Speaking of Part 1, I noticed that after I published that post, the Energy Bulletin website started churning out articles covering many of the same things discussed in my post, including the idea of cities putting together “diggable databases” of urban plots available for cultivation as the city of Portland has done. I'm glad I could be something of a ghostwriting inspiration to the folks at Energy Bulletin. (Then again, thievery is a form of flattery, isn't it?)

And now for Part 2. As usual, my questions and comments are in bold type.

What are the first steps for someone who wants to transition into urban farming as a career?

The first thing is to ask what your goals are. In other words, why are you doing this? What do you want to be doing day by day? Second, ask yourself what you need to get out of it, both financially and otherwise. Lastly, there is learning the skills. This depends heavily on how much money and space you have to play with.

When I first started, I met with this guy named Jac Smit, and he had an organization called the Urban Agriculture Network, which I think is still going – he died last year – but he had been working on urban agriculture projects. It turned out that he was not working on things in the United States – there really wasn't much going on in the United States at the time, but in a lot of other countries, they were fairly far along, particularly in a lot of developing countries, partly out of necessity.

He said one of the problems he saw in the United States was that most of the people that were interested in urban agriculture came from an urban background and probably came from a gardening background. They didn't know a whole lot about production, and didn't have the same mindset or skill set as a farmer who is producing goods. They were just growing things for their own consumption. So he said, “If you're really interested in urban agriculture, you should go and you should learn farming – and then bring that back into the urban setting,” because it's an appropriate thing, and that was one of the things that he saw that was working in developing countries – a lot of the people coming into cities were very recent migrants and had an agricultural background already.

So I took that advice and I went and apprenticed on a farm. And I've kind of been stuck in that farming thing for more than ten years now, learning the production end, and I feel like I'm just starting to get back to it [urban farming]. In some ways I'm actually a little less excited about it now, because I know some more of the realities and some of the reasons why it doesn't work as well. But I haven't given up on it, so I'm still looking at it and trying to figure out how I think it fits in best.

It's been about fifteen years since I talked to Jac Smit, and I think in that time period, the landscape has changed a lot, and there are a lot more people who are looking at urban farming, and there are more people coming in and doing urban agriculture projects with a production background, but there are still a lot of people doing it without that background. So that's one place where you could start – go to some production farms, whether in the city or outside the city, and just learn the techniques they're using and try to apply that to a smaller scale.

What were some of the difficulties you encountered that made you less enthusiastic as time passed?

One thing is that I'm excited about growing a lot of different things. If you are trying to do production in an urban environment, land is very expensive – space is very expensive – and water is expensive. There's a very limited subset of crops, I think, that make sense for a limited space. There's a lot of crops that take up a lot of space, so there are some things where I'm not sure how they fit into the urban setting, and I wasn't aware before that there were those differences, or maybe how big those differences were.

For example, the urban agriculture projects that I've seen that have been the most successful generally concentrate on something like salad greens, because you can grow a lot of salad greens in a very small space. And people don't eat as much by pound of salad greens as they eat of something like wheat. In 100 square feet you might be able to get a couple hundred servings of salad greens, whereas with wheat you could get something on the order of ten servings. That's a big difference, and the price of salad greens is probably at least five if not ten or twenty times as high as the price of wheat. So when you think about what you're going to do with an expensive, limited amount of space, there are some limitations there.

What does it take to get access to land in the city? Say Portland, for example?

There's a bunch of different models I see. Some people just outright buy a spot and own it. I have friends who just bought a house that sits on six tenths of an acre. I don't think there's a lot of places like that left in Portland, but there are still places like that. If they really wanted to push it, as a couple, they could certainly make a living off that amount of space. Other people might have a small yard of their own or they might have multiple small yards, and they're bartering that space, either because the people want to see things grown on it, or they want a share of the produce coming from it. And that's questionably legal right now, although the zoning will probably change in the near future to make it legal.

Why is it not quite legal right now?

It's questionable whether the zoning allows you to grow something and sell it on your property. You can probably argue that you can grow it and sell it, but the way that you sell it would have to be off the property. So if you were trying to distribute it directly on the property, that would probably make it illegal. It could probably be argued – although I'm not sure anyone would do this – that it's not even really legal to grow it on your property. Certainly if your neighbors were complaining, they would have a case, although they would probably not win, advocating that you shouldn't be doing what you're doing.

That you shouldn't be growing things on your property?

Not that you shouldn't be growing things, but that you shouldn't be growing them commercially. It's the commercial designation that makes it legal or not legal, because the space is zoned residential; it's not zoned commercial or agricultural. The same thing goes for commercial spaces, because they're zoned for a particular type of commercial use and they're not zoned for agriculture. Contamination is another issue you have to look at, because there are a lot of contaminated soils in urban areas and concentrations of different kinds of chemicals, particularly lead paint.

So another way people get land is more temporary – but land owned by a developer or even publicly owned land has a designated use, yet isn't going to be put to that use for a few years. So the owners may allow that land to be used for a period of time to grow things until they're ready to build their project on the land. I know a few people who are farming on such land; one group in North Portland is doing that with a church property where the church is going to expand, but they're probably not going to do it for another four or five years, so in the interim they're letting folks grow crops on the land.

And the County has a certain amount of tax-foreclosed land, and they make some of that available to organizations that want to do urban agriculture projects. Typically, these are non-profit – but a food production “business” (for lack of a better word) wouldn't necessarily have to be for profit; you could run it in some sense as a non-profit, and in an urban setting, that might actually make more sense, especially as you're not likely to make much of a profit anyway.

How do you find this land? Do you go on real estate websites to find properties like this that people aren't intending to use for a while?

I think one of the things that's an important distinction between urban agriculture and other types of agriculture is that there's a community aspect to it, and I think networking is important. Networking is how those lands and spaces get identified. It's probably more word-of-mouth than anything else. Once you get connected into a community of people that are talking about that and you start putting it out there that you're looking for space or that you have a project you want to do, you start running into people that say, “Oh, I know a spot. You can check with this person,...” or, “I have a spot. How could we work something out?” That's what makes urban agriculture work in a way that rural agriculture isn't working right now.

I think there probably are efforts – I can't recall any off the top of my head – but I think there are people who want to make clearing houses and create lists of available land. There was an effort through the City – I'm forgetting the name – I think it was the “Diggable City” project that tried to identify land a few years ago. But as far as the people I know who are actually doing urban agriculture projects, it's been more word-of-mouth, or people finding each other through existing networks.

You say that rural agriculture is not working that way – is rural agriculture failing in the United States?

In general, I think that it is, because I think what's happened is that the consolidation that's happened in terms of family-scale farms being consolidated into larger and larger industrial corporate factory farms has torn apart the rural community. So there's not a whole lot of “community” in rural communities anymore. That's a big issue, because it has switched the population base in the U.S. from a rural one to an urban population. This has gutted rural communities. It has also disconnected rural communities from urban markets – it has put a couple more layers of distribution systems between the two, because consolidation makes those operations so large that they have to distribute over a wider area in order to make their business work. That has lengthened ties and broken ties in a lot of communities.

If I were to look at the whole picture, I would say that strengthening the rural communities and going back to a rural agriculture that makes more sense is in most ways more important than thinking about how to do urban agriculture appropriately – because there is land there, and it's inexpensive land. If instead of trying to concentrate everybody into a few large urban centers, and figuring out how to make that urban land produce intensively for those people, we could spread those people out more so that the resulting population centers had more of a land base and didn't have to work so intensively, I think that would be ecologically a better model.

Let's say someone decides they want to move out to a rural area. They look on “Oregon Lands for Sale” and see a nice property, and they say, “Let's go for it, babe,” and they move out there. What are the financial barriers and pitfalls that might drive them back into the city? I know that you're not going to get rich from farming...

I don't think it's impossible to get rich, but I think you have to be more of a businessperson than just an idealist. You'd really have to concentrate on what it is that you're growing and how you're doing it, and take advantage of the things that a lot of other kinds of businesses take advantage of in order to make the people who own the business wealthy.

To get back to the pitfalls of moving out to a rural place, one is that there is still a general movement – although it's slowing down – toward consolidation in agriculture, and a movement from rural areas to the cities. So finding rural areas where that's not the case so much and trying to start a reversal – that's one challenge, or trying to become part of a movement that is reversing that trend in the particular area that you're moving to. To me that's a really difficult thing to predict – you can try to move to a place and become part of the community there, but it's a bit of a gamble.

I know farming folks, for example, who live on the south coast of Oregon, and they've lived there for their entire lives, and just now those communities are starting to grow again. They've been on a large downward slide for a long time, and now it's starting to come around again to where they have markets that they didn't have before for their produce. Before, they were more focused on exporting stuff and figuring out how to get it to the urban centers, and now they can actually market their goods within the area because of the change in the community.

How does someone secure land without going into debt, or without going deeply into debt? Or is that impossible right now?

I don't know if it's impossible right now – there's actually a blog by a guy named Andy Griffin, and he writes this blog called The Ladybug Letter. The writing is excellent; he doesn't post very often, but when he posts essays, they're really good. One of the last posts that he made was about that question. He's been farming in the Salinas area of California, which is some of the most expensive agricultural land in the country. He doesn't own any of his land.

He frames his essay in the form of a letter to these folks he heard on the radio. So he hears a young business student interviewed on the radio, and this business student is coming out college at a time when the economy is as bad as it's ever been in this person's lifetime. And the interviewer is asking this person how this is going to affect what the person will do once he gets out of business school, and he answers that he has a backup plan – “find some land with a bunch of friends and start a farm.”

So Andy's essay is his advice to this person, and the advice is, “Don't buy land.” There are enough people out there who own land and want something grown on it and are willing to lease it. From a business point of view, it's better to have the flexibility to leave the land if it's not productive in the way that you want it to be productive, and it's less expensive to lease the land than to buy it, and to get all your capital tied up in the land. You need your capital to be available for the operation of your business. His advice – and I think that in a lot of situations, it's very good advice – is to look for other options besides buying.

Try to find good long-term lease situations on good land, but leave things flexible, particularly if you're growing annual crops. It's more difficult to be flexible when you're growing perennials and tree crops. But with annuals, although this is not ideal, you can spend a year or two getting the land into good enough shape to produce profitably, and then pay off your lease in two or three years of crop production. And if the lease terms go longer than that, you're basically just making money. If the terms don't go longer, you haven't lost any money. But if you buy the land, you could get two or three years into working it and realize that the land doesn't produce what you want it to produce, and you'd be stuck with this piece that you have to keep putting excess money into.

Both from a rural and an urban standpoint, is it possible for a person without debts to pay the yearly expenses of life in the United States by farming?

Oh, sure, yeah! But part of it also goes back to that question of “What do you want to be doing from day to day?”, and “What do you want to be growing?” Is it possible in every situation everywhere? No, but farming isn't inherently not profitable. But there are certain segments of farming and ways of farming which are not profitable, yet common.

Ways of farming that are both common and unprofitable...how do they survive?

Well, most of them survive through subsidies. And there are all kinds of subsidies – some people subsidize themselves through holding other jobs, and some people are subsidized through the government.

But they're basically doing something that's unsustainable in the long run?

Economically, yeah, unless the subsidies stay there.

That brings up this question: a lot of Western farming is basically mining the soil. How do we “close the loop”? I read The Humanure Handbook and other literature along that line, and it seems like that's what we'll have to go back to if this is going to be viable. And there are podcasts on Deconstructing Dinner where they talk about decreasing concentrations of certain minerals in crops. So how do we close the loop? Is anyone working on that?

I think lots of people are working on it. It's a difficult question – are you familiar with biodynamic farming? Do you know who Rudolf Steiner is?

No...

Rudolf Steiner was a guy who worked on a lot of different things. He was able to understand the complete picture regarding many things. He worked on biodynamic agriculture. One of its primary tenets is that you create the farm as a closed system. He says something important when he says that this is the goal; it's not necessarily something that's going to happen. But if your goal is to always try to work toward the farm as a closed system in itself, so that nutrients aren't leaving the system and you're not having to import nutrients, you'll be creating a better form of agriculture.

So the whole biodynamic community is working on that. There are also a lot of people outside the biodynamic community – in organic agriculture, in particular – that have that same thought process. The people who are trying to do this properly who are at the same time trying to sustain themselves economically are always balancing those two things, because our present economic system basically doesn't reward that in any way. Instead, it rewards the “mining” system.

That's maybe one of the drawbacks of leasing as opposed to owning land, although it's not an intrinsic drawback. But the tendency with leased land would be to take that mining approach, because you won't necessarily see any kind of payback [from restoring the soil] as opposed to working the land for a longer period of time.

The humanure concept is an important one – to understand that anything people eat that's going off the farm – if you're not capturing that waste and putting it back into the system, then it's a loss, basically. You can try to limit the losses in every other area, but if you don't address this loss, you can't recapture it without mining somewhere else to bring nutrients in.

Are there experiments in urban areas in the United States to try humanure composting for urban agriculture?

It's very controversial in organic systems, because, for example, in the Midwest – I can't remember whether it's Wisconsin or Minnesota – they've been pushing sewage sludge as a soil amendment in fields, because it's high in nutrients. But the problem with the municipal waste system – and I think there's some question of the amount of heavy metals in people's diets also – is that you're concentrating heavy metals and other contaminants into that waste. So not only are you getting nutrients onto the fields, but you're also contaminating the fields by using sludge. For those reasons, the organic community has decided that they will not allow any kind of sewage sludge in organic fields. Cleaning up the waste stream has to happen before this waste can be used on a large scale.

On a small scale, the fellow that wrote the Humanure Handbook has a good argument for it and I'm sure there are other people doing humanure composting, but because of all the points he makes in his book, I don't think very many people are willing to talk about it openly. I've met a couple of people who have admitted to trying that system, and I haven't heard of any downsides, but I haven't met a lot of people who admit to it.

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That concludes the main part of my interview with Josh Volk. We talked a bit more afterward about how people can learn farming by visiting urban farms and volunteering to help (along with volunteer etiquette). We also talked about a typical day for an urban farmer (contrary to stereotype, not all farmers work from sunup to sundown, seven days a week), and discussed a few urban farmers in the Portland metro area who transport themselves and their cargo entirely by bicycle. (Obviously, this doesn't work for everyone in every situation.)

One last note: for several months now, urban agriculture has been very much on the radar screen of the mainstream media. Many news articles have focused on key individuals – “movers and shakers”, if you will – with lots of money and influence who are announcing plans to “save” dying cities in the U.S. through the promotion of urban agriculture. The interest, energy and vision of these people is often praised by the media (and by undiscerning members of the blogosphere) as a good thing, a key component of a national return to a more sustainable lifestyle.

I think such a view is totally mistaken. The beauty of urban agriculture and of other strategies of resilience now being adopted by ordinary people is that these offered a way for ordinary people to decouple from a predatory economic system so that these people wouldn't keep getting bled dry by that system. When the “big people” – the rich and influential – also “discovered” these opportunities, they saw them not as a way to live more sustainably, but as an opportunity to cash in by turning a public trend into a growth industry. Therefore, where cities like Detroit were places where people who wanted to decouple from the money economy could go to live simply, cheaply and debt free, Detroit has now been “discovered” by speculators with big plans to “do something good for the city” while making tons of money. Thus one avenue of escape from our predatory money economy has been destroyed. Ordinary people in Detroit are once again in danger of being sucked up into a system whose masters maximize profits by squeezing people to death.

What good is urban agriculture to ordinary people if it takes on all the characteristics of every other form of industrial, consolidated modern agribusiness? What good is it to be an urban farmer in Detroit or Cleveland if urban agriculture there is controlled and run by a handful of rich speculators who have swooped in and bought up all the land and you're just minimum-wage "hired help"? I commented somewhat on the disturbing activities of speculators in depressed areas of our country in two 2009 posts titled, “Is Community Resilience Possible At This Time?” and “Report From The Front Lines - 3-20-09.” More recently, a blogger named Ran Prieur also made the same observations on his blog.