Tractor man speaks

Apologies that I’ve been so silent on here of late. Too much going on. My thanks though to Alice for keeping the flame burning here with her guest post – very interesting discussion.

In other news, Jim Thomas has filed this interesting report from COP16 in Cali, and in its budget this week the British government has applied limited inheritance tax for the first time to farmland transfers. Meanwhile, environment secretary Steve Reed has said that farmers and conservationists will have to “learn to do more with less”. Fascinating to see how that one turns out…

More on those perhaps in due course. I’m still under the cosh with other work so posts may remain sporadic, but anyway I’m here now so let’s give something a whirl broadly on the ‘more with less’ front.

So… now that I’ve earned a little carbon credibility by passing up the opportunity to fly to North America for a book tour, it’s time for a confession – we have a tractor and a mini digger on our holding.

Hey, don’t go! I know that as someone who writes about the end of modernity and the fossil fuel age, this news might raise some eyebrows. I mean, you’re welcome to go and find the farmer who stays afloat commercially and makes no use of fossil fuels. But we’re working to cut the diesel guzzlers out of our lives. I’m going to try to explain what’s involved in that and some of the parameters around it in this post.

The impetus for it came from the X account @brightabyss, who wrote:

If you are cultivating food in a good way that still requires tractors, constant inputs of plastics, and loads of fossil fuels you are not doing “agroecology”, “regenerative farming”, or “stewarding the land”. You are just being less destructive.

He added “My comment is not about moralism, but about human scale production & transitioning toward ecological embeddedness and more people labour in food production.”

I basically agree with this. But I’m not gonna lie: the fact that this sometime ivory tower academic can now sit in the digger with the two joysticks in my hand and control its movements without even really thinking about it does give me a certain amount of pleasure. And a lot less backache. Still, I doubt such skillsets will serve humanity long into the future. So, yes, we need to talk about transitioning. But there’s a lot of complexity wrapped up in that, which I don’t think is always well understood in public discussion. I’ll try to encompass some of that complexity in my handy seven-point guide to the agrarian fossil fuel transition below.

1. Fossil energy use on the diverse small farm is low…

First, a sense of proportion. Tractors and diggers on the farm may not be exactly the wave of the future, but in the short-term their energy footprint is generally low compared to many other activities in modern society. We use about a car tankful of diesel and petrol annually in the tractor, digger and other machines for our small market garden and other food and fibre producing activities on our site. Most people I know think nothing of using that much for a recreational weekend trip. So let’s not go too overboard about how unsustainable it is. On our holding and many similar ones I know, our use of fossil fuels is too high, unsustainably high, but compared to many other uses it’s not “loads”, and there are many other areas of modern life with greater priority for fossil fuel belt-tightening.

2. …but the work it can do is phenomenal…

We have a 1980 Ford 3600 tractor, delivering 45 horsepower at the PTO. That makes it virtually a toy by modern farming standards (somewhat less so when it was made – farm scale has changed a lot, and fast). Even so, it has astonishing power compared to human work output. A fit and motivated person can reportedly sustain a manual work output of 75W. Forty-five horsepower equates to about 33,500W. So, at the touch of a button, our little tractor gives us about 450 farmworkers. I’m definitely onboard with the idea of more people labour in food production, and we do mobilise a bit of local people-power to help us get some jobs done. But it’s hard to summon 450 of them with the turn of a key. So when we talk about transitioning from machine to human labour, it’s worth bearing in mind quite what a jump that could be.

3. …and at a very reasonable price…

The minimum wage currently is £11.44 per hour. A litre of red agricultural diesel currently averages £0.73 (about half white diesel prices) – call it 80p with delivery and storage costs. Our tractor uses about 10 litres of diesel per hour when it’s working hard – so that’s £8 direct costs for an hour of tractor work. To get the same amount of work done via human labour on the basis of the 1:450 ratio at the minimum wage would cost over £5,000. It’s easy to see why our farming systems prefer machine labour over people labour, and why the transition to the latter might be difficult.

A few further considerations to lob in here. Tractors can do a lot of manual work, but they’re better at some things than others – ploughing and harrowing yes, tying up beans or harvesting cut-and-come-again lettuce leaves, not so much. So mechanisation pushes the farm system toward certain crops and cropping styles that aren’t necessarily the healthiest or lowest footprint.

Also, there’s something to be said for the power of humans working together rather than foot-on-throttle power, but the former just isn’t going to match the latter in pure wattage, however good you are at building work relationships. That’s probably a good thing. There’s a problem of overproduction in global agriculture due to the fact that it’s so easy to produce more food with more foot-on-throttle power – which suits corporations and other state interests, but isn’t so great for ordinary people and other living things. Without that easy recourse to fossils, people will produce less food, more diverse and healthy food and food scaled to local needs. Which would be a fine thing, but expectations would have to change – no more super-cheap ‘buy one get one free’ offers at the supermarket, I’m afraid.

Wage labour of the present kind is unlikely to be the way that the extra people needed in the post-fossil food production will be brought into the system. But their inputs are likely to be structured in various possible ways, some more appealing than others. This needs more attention than it’s currently getting.

4. Embodied costs don’t matter, and also count for everything

As well as the ‘revenue’ energy costs of the fuel, machinery also incurs ‘capital’ or embodied energy costs in its construction and final disposal. When I looked at this some years ago, I concluded that these costs were pretty low for a tractor like mine relative to the revenue costs. That conclusion probably doesn’t hold for the latest high-tech tractors with their proprietary computer systems or, for that matter, for fancy modern cars, regardless of propulsion method.

Anyway, I don’t think embodied energy is a huge deal in strictly energetic terms. But when it comes to the capital costs of machinery, that’s not really to the point. A tractor is a massive embodiment of human and social capital, of techno-legal and techno-social systems, requiring a complex, high-energy, global historical civilisation behind it. It’s easy to imagine future perturbations to those systems that could pull the rug from tractor civilization in most places. As Walter Haugen pithily put it here a while back – “if you’re riding on it, it’s not sustainable”.

5. Terraform now!

…which means if you’re running an agricultural project and use a tractor, a digger or other heavy energetic/hydraulic kit it’s probably best to think of them as short-term gifts that may soon be gone. That in turn means that they’re best used to terraform local food landscapes that will function in lower energy-input systems after their demise, not to terraform landscapes in accordance with the economies of scale presently achievable with big agricultural kit.

When you apply that to existing agri-bioregions it might suggest an almost Biblical ‘first shall be last’ future in respect of the most ‘productive’ existing farmscapes. Top quality agricultural soils are great and all, but there’s going to be a lot of work involved in terraforming them back into diverse and usable small-farm landscapes out of existing big field ag. So … Somerset instead of Lincolnshire? Northern California instead of Iowa?

6. Watch out for ghost energy

Of course, simply cutting out the tractor won’t help if instead you import other materials or energies into your system that require heavy fossil-fuelled kit somewhere else. No buying in tons of municipal compost, now!

When you start doing the inventory on this, it gets quite scary quite fast.

A lot of our tractor/digger use is in compost management in relation to materials that come from offsite. So long as we’re selling vegetables onto the open market for the pittance that they command, I’m not massively bothered about paying a pittance for a few litres of diesel to feed machines that do the work of thousands and help us stay afloat in that insane economy. But in the longer term, yes, we need less fossil energy use, and more mixed farming systems involving green manuring and livestock. We’ve been heading in that direction slowly on our holding. I hope the tractor’s days are numbered. I guess all I’ll say on that front is that it’s a good idea not to point the finger too much at food producers themselves for unsustainable production practices. They’re responding to an economic landscape which is largely not of their making. We need to own this society-wide.

7. Choose who you work with – or, tractors don’t talk back

All of which is to say that I think @brightabyss is right to suggest we need to work toward ‘more people labour in food production’. But oh boy what trials and tribulations are buried in those few words! Leaving aside the grim economics of trying to make this work in the present fossil-fuelled economy, do not, whatever you do, underestimate the amount of time and emotional labour necessary to coax that 75W out of the people you work with … and out of yourself.

We’ve done quite a bit of experimenting over the years with what works for us and what doesn’t on these fronts. I’ve also written quite a bit about this here before in relation to the histories of family labour, neighbourly collaboration and commons – the lessons of which from past societies we ignore at our peril. Best get started with it now, without starry-eyed assumptions that it’ll all work out just fine or that the inherent urge to collective labour of the proletariat unchained from bourgeois predilections toward private property will carry all before it. I suspect the agrarian societies that figure this out successfully in a post-fossil future will share certain features with agrarian societies of the pre-fossil past, with a lot of emphasis on kin relations and carefully regulated commons.

Which all sounds like a lot of emotional work and friction. To frame it in a soundbite: tractors don’t talk back, which is one reason a lot of people prefer them.

But that’s not entirely true – tractors do talk back in the sense that they break down, usually when you’re just starting on a large and time-critical job. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot to be said for human interaction. Assembling working companions and figuring out ways of working with other people is in many ways the very stuff of life. But a stitch in time with a grease gun and a new fuel filter can save a lot of assembling and figuring. Just saying. Enjoy it while it lasts!

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