Chapter 1

Food, Factories
and Farmers

H ow we produce food to eat and fibre for other uses is

fundamental to understanding everything else. We
now know that both fossil fuels and the modern agricultural
systems that rely on them are causing terrible problems, per-
haps most importantly climate change, but also biodiversity
loss and a range of toxic and nutritional assaults on human
wellbeing. But there are some difficulties in apportioning the
blame between fossil fuels, agriculture and society that are
necessary to understand if we’re to address them wisely. This
is an important theme that runs through this book. What’s for
sure is that we need to cut fossil fuel use globally essentially
to zero, and quickly. We also need to farm in a different way
– though if we cut out fossil fuels, we won’t have any choice
about that. To understand the nature of the choices that may
still be open to us, it’s necessary to sketch a bit of farming and
food system history.
There’s no sharp historical distinction between the for-
aging of hunter-gatherers and farming. In both cases, people
have pushed the productive envelope of their surroundings to
try to generate more of what they want and less of what they

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don’t, not unlike other organisms. Farmers have just pushed

it really hard, often by focusing food production around
short-lived, input-demanding plants that pack a heavy punch
of nutrients. Across our deep time, Homo sapiens – like vari-
ous other species, too – has often created mosaic landscapes
comprising woodland and grassland of specific types. With
the farming of high-input/high-output plants, we’ve added
cropland to the mix.
The two key groups of heavy-punching cropland plants
worldwide are grasses (cereals, especially) and legumes,
which give us the energy and protein we need. Legumes have
the additional advantage of making atmospheric nitrogen
available to other plants, which is needed for growth. Plants
also get carbon and oxygen from the atmosphere. All the
other elements they need come from the soil.
A lot of global agricultures and their associated cuisines
are based around a cereal-legume combo: rice with dal, tor-
tillas with frijoles and, er, baked beans on toast. But remem-
ber we’re pushing the envelope. We need to let the soil rest
from time to time, and we need to rotate crops. A common
innovation in global agriculture has been to intersperse a
grass-legume combo for human consumption that tends to
take fertility from the soil with another grass-legume combo,
like ryegrass and white clover, that tends to make or restore
fertility to the soil. We can’t eat ryegrass and clover directly
ourselves, but grazing animals like cattle can. The main point
of the cattle in such a system is not to produce meat or milk,
although that’s important, so much as to manage the ecology
of the cropland by helpfully mowing the grass and turning it
into something useful out of the rear end. Historically, cattle
were also important as beasts of transport and traction on
the farm.

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This rotation of temporary cropland with temporary

pastureland (‘leys’) is called ‘mixed’ farming, because it mixes
crops with livestock over the course of a rotation. I don’t think
it’s an exaggeration to say that many human civilisations have
pretty much been built on it.
Let’s throw some more elements into the mix, starting with
horticulture – vegetables from the garden and fruits from the
orchard. These don’t usually give as much energy and protein
as the field crops, though they do give some. They do, how-
ever, give vitamins and trace minerals, and they add variety
to the diet. Some of these crops can be grown broadscale, but
historically people rarely did this. Horticulture was more of
a household matter. The characteristic livestock of house
and garden are pigs and chickens, which can turn low-grade
waste from the kitchen or garden (or from the dairy, bakery
and brewery) into higher-grade food such as fat, and gener-
ally help manage the ecology of the garden in a similar, but
smaller-scale, way to cattle in the field.
A mixed farm like this with its cropland, pasture, orchard,
garden, cattle, pigs and chickens works holistically as a com-
plete system. It wouldn’t make sense to say that the cattle in
the pasture are less productive of protein than the legumes
in the cropland, even though that would be true if concep-
tually you split off the pasture from the cropland and did a
kilograms per hectare calculation for each one. The point is,
you can’t conceptually split them off. The cropland needs the
pasture. The farm needs the cropland. And the daily eating,
trampling and excreting of the livestock in the fields and
gardens ticks work off the to-do list that it would take the
farmer weeks to achieve alone.
Talking of protein, it’s worth noting that while it’s
absolutely essential to the human diet, it’s not the critically

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limiting nutritional factor in terms of farming land take.

That honour goes to energy or calorie crops, which, in a
mixed farming situation in the UK, usually require about half
as much land again as that needed for protein crops.
But there aren’t many mixed farms any more in the UK
and other wealthy countries. That’s because of fossil fuels,
primarily in their role as both energy source and hydrogen
feedstock for the industrial manufacture of nitrogenous
fertiliser, which basically does away with the need for grazed
leys. And also because the abundance of fossil fuels means
that other farm inputs, and farm products, can easily move
worldwide to where they’re demanded, while the skilled
human labour inputs on the mixed farm can be reduced.
The result of this historically has been that agricultural
regions have increasingly specialised heavily in the few crops
they can sell most advantageously into global markets, and
people have gravitated to the places where their chances of
prosperity are greatest – which is what people always do,
understandably. In the past, that generally meant rural areas
with the best available soils and climates. With the advent of
fossil-fuelled agriculture and transport, it generally meant
cities that were no longer tied to local geographical realities.
These changes in modern agriculture have broken mixed
farming into separate cropland farming (arable) and grassland
livestock farming (pastoralism), although modern livestock
farming of all kinds has increasingly not been pastoral but
based on feeding arable products to livestock in concentrated
feedlots. When people talk about ‘conventional’ farming, this
rather novel, fossil-fuelled and specialised approach is basic-
ally what they mean.
Organic farming is also quite a new concept, referring
essentially to modern farms that choose to use organic and

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not synthetic fertiliser and pesticides. On larger-scale farms,

this means in practice that organic farms often resemble trad-
itional mixed farms with grazed leys. Contrary to a common
misconception, organic farms aren’t based around raising
lots of livestock to produce fertility (livestock don’t produce
fertility). They’re based around having the correct balance
between cropland and leys to maintain productive soil, and
therefore around having the correct number of livestock to
graze the leys and help cycle the fertility.
Market gardening to produce vegetables for sale is another
relatively recent innovation, driven by urbanisations that
meant people no longer had the space or time to grow their
own. Like organic mixed farms, modern organic market gar-
dens often use leys to build fertility. But sometimes they don’t
keep any livestock because it’s easier to manage the leys with
tractors and machinery. This makes a lot of sense in present
market conditions, but it depends upon the cheap energy and
equipment prices of the modern fossil-fuelled economy. In
low-energy situations, this work would be done by livestock
– or else, more laboriously, by people.
To complete this thumbnail survey of agricultural history,
one other major category of traditional farming is pastoral-
ism. Here’s one way to look at it: in rangeland places that are
too hot, cold, dry, wet or poorly furnished with soils to grow
good crops, people have developed systems of herding domes-
ticated livestock, usually ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats and
reindeer, for example), to turn inedible (to humans) grass
and brush into meat, milk, fat and fibre.
Here’s another way to look at it: those too hot, cold, dry
or wet rangeland places actually comprise most of the world’s
agricultural area. But in the places where arable cropping
is possible it’s so fantastically productive nutritionally that

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it’s generated a global population distribution essentially of

populous arable islands set within a more thinly populated
sea of grass and woodland. As people on the arable islands
have grown in numbers and wealth, they’ve demanded more
meat. Fossil-fuelled agribusiness has stepped in to provide
it, notably from the rangelands. Think of the cowboy in
the urbanising US of the nineteenth century – less a rustic
holdout against the spreading cities, more a servant of them,
driving cattle to the railheads and thence to the urban masses.
But the proper job of people who live in the rangelands is
not to furnish meat for the Global Standard Consumer. Their
job is to feed, clothe and house themselves with the help of the
livestock they raise. When they’re able to do this without
interference from commoditised supply chains geared to
feeding city consumers, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest
that pastoralists can provide for their needs without their
livestock causing the ecological destruction the ecomodern-
ists allege – indeed, they can help build ecologically complex
and renewable local landscapes.1
There’s a larger point here: while meat is arguably the most
environmentally damaging food product furnished by com-
moditised supply chains to the Global Standard Consumer,
the damage is associated mostly with the commodity supply
chain and its power to extract resources from some places and
oversupply them to others, compromising the ecological base
of both. The problem inheres more in the strong extractive
power of the supply chain than in any specific product. The
same applies to the damage associated with plant products
like wheat, soy, palm oil or vegetables, where the model of
consumption drives damaging forms of production for global
commodity markets. To redress the damage involves chan-
ging the model of consumption and production, not so much

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the product that’s consumed. Pastoralist history helps iden-

tify a key fulcrum of historical change in that respect that
I’ll discuss later in the book. While – as I mentioned above –
mixed farmers built civilisation in the world’s cropland areas,
‘civilisation’ (a society of cities) isn’t something that pastoral
peoples have always held in high regard.
Still, traditional agricultures in many parts of the world have
developed interrelated livestock and cropping systems at whole
landscape levels that make the most of available resources from
a human point of view, for example in the differentiated but
interlinked sheep-corn and wood-pasture systems of southern
England that emerged in the 1600s.2 So pastoral and arable or
mixed-arable systems can be complementary.

From Farm to Factory:

Enter Manufactured Food
The energetic basis of all the agricultures I’ve mentioned so
far lies almost entirely in the ability of crop plants to fix the
sun’s energy into carbohydrates in their tissue via photosyn-
thesis. This is true of modern fossil-fuelled agriculture too,
even if the fossil fuels give it an energetic leg up. People then
get the energy and other nutrients they need by eating the
crop plant, or eating an animal that ate the crop plant.
But there’s a new kid on the block, involving a totally
different energetic pathway. Actually, there are several new
kids on the block, each with a different novel energetic
pathway, all dreamt up by biotechnologists in modern times.
The one I’m going to focus on here is the one that’s gener-
ated the most excitement because its technical feasibility has
seemed the most plausible. It’s the one that Monbiot focuses

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on in Regenesis, involving a hydrogen-oxidising bacterium,

Cupriavidus necator, which he correctly states was ‘discovered
in the soil’ but which is also cultured by biotechnologists in
various genetically modified strains.3
How it works in brief is that this bacterium is fed hydrogen
and oxygen inside a stainless-steel bioreactor, which enables
it to multiply, ultimately producing a protein-rich slurry of
dead bacterial biomass that, after treatment, is suitable for
human consumption (or at least probably mostly suitable – as
I’ll soon discuss).
To get the hydrogen and oxygen renewably, it’s necessary
to electrolyse water, and this requires energy. A lot of energy
– which is something of a problem, as I argue in Chapter 2. So
when George Monbiot writes, ‘I watched scientists turning
water into food,’ you may need to turn down the dial on your
miracle-ometer.4 The more so because the process requires
not only hydrogen and oxygen, but also large quantities of
various other elements like nitrogen, phosphorus and sul-
phur, all of which have to come from somewhere.
Anyway, that in a nutshell is the process. Instead of relying
on the bioreactor of a cow’s stomach or a bean plant’s root
nodules to conjure protein and other nutrients for us, the aim
is to cut out the middle mammal or middle legume and do it
ourselves in a bioreactor of our own construction. Whether
that’s a good idea is another matter, and a good deal of this
book is devoted to considering it. In the biotech world, there
seems to be a whole raft of ideas about what use to make of
C. necator – to feed astronauts on long-term space missions, to
synthesise biofuels and bioplastics or, as in the case championed
by Monbiot, to replace food-as-meat and possibly food-as-
grains with engineered Food-as-Software. To me it looks like
an early-stage field of speculative biotech and venture capital

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investment whose proponents are throwing out a lot of ideas to

see which ones might stick. My hunch is none of them.
One thing to note about C. necator is that the biomass it
produces contains endotoxins and high concentrations of
nucleic acids with potentially harmful effects on human
health.5 Livestock are unaffected by nucleic acids, and some
researchers have concluded that microbial biomass is better
suited to feeding livestock than people, somewhat ironically
in view of Monbiot’s enthusiasm for it as a way to eliminate
the former.
The authors of another paper write, ‘Problems related to
poor digestibility, gastrointestinal diseases, skin and allergic
reactions and other, even more serious problems should be
addressed in the laboratory before reaching production
units.’6 Let’s hope so.
It seems that rigorous process control, filtration and other
treatments may succeed in removing or mitigating these
problems, and there are already regulatory approvals for
C. necator biomass as human food along with relevant patents
and trademarks, such as the Solein protein produced by a
company called Solar Foods that Monbiot discusses exten-
sively in Regenesis. But I can’t say what I’ve read so far tempts
me to seek a switch from familiar farmed sources of protein.
It’s also worth noting that microbial protein manufacture
has not yet been scaled up to industrial production levels,
and bioreactor contamination has proved a major technical
stumbling block in scaleup efforts with similar technologies.7
We can try to cut out the middle plant or mammal but, when
it comes to bioreactor design, legumes, ruminants and other
farmed organisms have a head start of several million years.
A word on terminology. Among its proponents, ‘precision
fermentation’ is the term of choice for the manufacture of

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microbial biomass from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria. To me,

it smacks of biotech industry PR, its winning combination of
scienciness and wholesomeness obscuring the fact that the
process may not be quite as precise as you think, nor quite as
old school as words like brewing and fermentation bring to
mind. Others think of the process within the larger category
of synthetic biology or ‘synbio’, especially because strains of
C. necator are produced with genetic engineering methods.
In the earthy community of agrarian localist sceptics,
words like ‘studge’ and ‘gloop’ have been used, but perhaps a
more neutral term is called for. ‘Bacilliculture’ is favoured by
some. It has the advantage of resonating with more familiar
words like ‘agriculture’ and ‘horticulture’. But it sounds a bit
too technical, so I’m going to go with ‘manufactured food’,
which is vaguer but still reflects something of what’s involved
and is more recognisable within everyday language.
The manufactured food I mostly discuss is the protein-rich
microbial biomass resulting from the hydrogen-oxidising
work of Cupriavidus necator, the focus of most of the excite-
ment in the food industry.

Three Agricultures
So far in this chapter I’ve discussed farming in terms of dif-
ferent methods of production. But, as I mentioned in the
Introduction, it’s also important to consider how it meshes
with social and political systems. I introduced the distinction
between the industrial food chain and the local food web, and
it’s time now to develop that line of thought further. To do
so, I’m going to draw on a three-part scheme of Malthusian,
industrial and intensive agricultures borrowed from agrarian
analyst Glenn Davis Stone.8

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Malthusian agriculture is named after Thomas Robert

Malthus (1766–1834), who argued in his notorious An Essay
on the Principle of Population that the human propensity to
procreate tends to outrun our capacity to produce enough
food to fill the resulting bellies. Given that human numbers
have increased around eightfold since his day and food pro-
duction has outstripped it, in ecomodernist circles Malthus
stands indicted as the original Chicken Little environmental-
ist, forever making dire predictions of looming disasters and
the need for us to limit ourselves that in the event human
ingenuity transcends.
Actually, this wasn’t Malthus’s argument at all. He was
an enthusiast for economic and population growth.9 Still,
the Malthusian spectre of population growth and famine is
a useful foil for an ecomodernist argument about ingenuity
and progress: but for the ministrations of heroic scientists
working to increase crop yields and develop new foods, the
argument goes, humanity stares starvation in the face and is
apt to gobble up yet more of the planet’s surface in a desper-
ate bid to increase food production.
The threat of climate change represents a new front in
this venerable Malthusian narrative – probably a more con-
vincing one than most of its predecessors. But for his part,
Stone rejects the notion that constant and radical agricul-
tural improvement is required to avoid famine, an approach
he labels ‘Malthusian agriculture’. So we have the slightly
confusing situation where some people argue that we need
high-tech scientific innovation to avoid famine and environ-
mental destruction, and some people argue that we don’t but
perhaps need to adapt our social behaviours, and both groups
call the other one ‘Malthusian’.
I sometimes wonder what Malthus’s own spectre makes

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of being turned into this all-purpose historical bogeyman.

But it’s hard to be too sympathetic, given that he believed his
own achievement had been to prove mathematically that the
poor will always be with us and there’s not much to be done
about it. If nothing else, I take Malthus’s sorry reputation as a
cautionary tale for anyone who claims their views about pop-
ulation, food and technology are arithmetically inarguable.
Anyway, in Stone’s analysis, industrial agriculture refers to
modern attempts to exorcise the supposed Malthusian spectre
with high-tech innovation, usually geared to increasing per
hectare and per worker yields of the major cereal and legume
crops. He argues this has four problematic aspects.
First, it involves appropriation, where processes that were
once under the control of the farmer such as fertility build-
ing with leys and livestock on the traditional mixed farm are
taken off the farm, turned into an industrial process, and
then sold back to the farmer as an input beyond their control.
Second, it involves public subsidy of private corporations.
From the early days of experiments with synthetic fertiliser in
the nineteenth century, a combination of industry lobbying,
fear of the Malthusian spectre and state anxiety about keep-
ing ahead in the international technological arms race has
generated a one-way flow of public money into the coffers of
biotech corporations. Maybe this resonates with the Reboot
Food campaign’s request for governments to spend 2.5 per
cent of GDP on ‘rebooting’ the food system.10
It’s also generated two-way ‘revolving door’ effects, with
a churn of scientists between publicly funded university
research and privately funded corporate research, and a
churn of policymakers and opinion leaders between private
corporations and public politics. I’m not suggesting this
necessarily involves direct graft, but I think it does set the

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agenda of the questions deemed worth and not worth asking

in mainstream policy circles. The case for manufactured food
and against food sovereignty displays definite signs of this
selective policy agenda.
Stone’s third criticism of industrial agriculture is its ten-
dency to overproduction. When its tech innovations succeed,
they can generate abundant produce at low prices. But this
can be a mixed blessing. Not only does it create problems for
farmers, governments and wider citizenries, it can also ex-
acerbate rather than limit the problem of land gobbling as
new markets and higher profits are sought through agricul-
tural expansion. This is a particular problem with commodity
crops like soy and maize, whose cultivation has expanded into
precious grassland and woodland habitats, even though little
of it is used directly for human consumption. Agricultural
sprawl is a consequence of industrial farming and supply
chain commodification.
Finally, industrial agriculture can involve damage to human
or environmental health, often in hidden ways that prove hard to
attribute to the underlying agricultural practice. Think Silent
Spring, Rachel Carson’s mother text of environmental concern.
The march of industrialisation in the food and farming
sector has been considerable – Monbiot cites a figure that
90 per cent of the global grain trade is controlled by just
four companies.11 But that’s not the same as saying these
companies control 90 per cent of global grain. In most parts
of the world, especially in the Global South, there are small
farms producing for household or immediate community
needs without significant participation in global commodity
chains. By some estimates, such farms are the main source
of nutrition for around 70 per cent of the world’s people –
a figure that has its critics, but also its defenders.12

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Whatever the exact figure, it’s plain that the food produc-
tion sector is much less industrialised and concentrated than
the manufacturing sector. Whereas you can find gardens, allot-
ments or small farms producing food for local consumption
almost everywhere, you can’t find small workshops producing
cars, computers or most other consumer items for local use.
Often enough, whole countries or global regions lack such
industries. A big problem with the ecomodernist case for a
‘disruptive’ food revolution and a turn to manufactured food is
the pressure it would put on local food systems and the ramp-
ing up of monopoly concentration, potentially to manufactur-
ing sector levels (see Chapter 5). This would implicate all four
of the difficulties of industrial agriculture I just mentioned.
Intensive agriculture is a troublesome concept used in
all sorts of different situations. At its simplest, to intensify
production just means to apply more of an input such as
human labour, energy, water or pesticides to gain more of an
output. So ‘intensification’ signals a change of input regimen,
whereas ‘intensive’ applied as an adjective to a steady-state
form of agriculture is less clear.
Intensive agriculture is often used as a synonym for indus-
trial agriculture, but Stone uses it quite differently to refer to
what he calls the ‘third agriculture’: local agricultures with a
degree of autonomy from global commodity chains. The key
point is that in this agriculture farmers have more control
over their decisions about intensification, and when they do
intensify, they do so without major dependence on industrial
inputs or land expansion. Instead, they change practices,
work longer hours or devise their own new technologies
locally – essentially applying more inputs under their control,
or gaining more return out of such inputs, and then stopping
when they’ve produced enough.

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Peasants, smallholders, agrarians, homesteaders, self-

supporters are all more or less problematic terms for farming
of this kind. There’s a vast and informative peasant studies
literature that can help us understand its dynamics, but
one of the problems with it is that it’s been dominated by
nineteenth- and twentieth-century concerns about modern-
isation – essentially of how to stop peasants being peasants
and have them do something better instead. My argument is
that there isn’t something better to do, at least not something
that’s sustainable in the long term. But that can too easily
become a backward-looking argument to restore a vision
of times past, and the negative connotations of the word
‘peasant’ hardly help. Better, perhaps, to look forward to
what an intensive or third agriculture could be in the future.
A useful term in this respect is agroecology, which is the
attempt to learn the lessons of how the third agriculture goes
about its business via ecological rather than industrial inputs,
although the term is also increasingly used within industrial
agriculture. In a sense, this is at the heart of the debate with
the ecomodernists that I explore throughout this book. At
issue is whether nature- and people-friendly food production
is best put into the hands of industrial players to furnish food
en masse for predominantly urban populations unable to
produce it themselves, or in the hands of small-scale farmers
and local communities, the latter implying a greater degree
of ruralism.
Relevant to this debate is a longstanding narrative that
holds intensive, third and peasant agriculture to be inef-
ficient, outmoded, inadequate and damaging, suggesting it
should be replaced by more modern, scientific and high-tech
methods. An equally longstanding counternarrative chal-
lenges these assertions with a rich research tradition showing

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how peasant farms have been, in the words of agricultural

historian Jim Handy, ‘tiny engines of abundance’ in which
ordinary people have self-generated wellbeing for themselves
and their communities with remarkable success, often when
the odds of the larger global economy were stacked against
them, and often with less environmental degradation than
that wreaked by the larger system. Indeed, the only variable
on which industrial agriculture unquestionably outperforms
peasant agriculture is productivity per unit of on-farm labour
input.13 Arguably, that’s unlikely to be an important future
goal. Ecological economists suggest that the growth sectors in
future employment will be job-rich and carbon-minimising.
The third agriculture is likely to be one of them. 14
The global food system is in a strange historical moment,
with the present fossil-fuelled overproduction and maldistrib-
uted abundance now toeing a potential future cliff-edge of so-
called Malthusian scarcity. In the chapters to come, I’ll be argu-
ing that the best way to deal with these problems is to augment
the capacities of local food webs in the diverse hands of third
and peasant agrarians. For now, I just want to emphasise what
a dramatic change from the present food system in a wealthy
country like Britain that’s likely to be. Those who subscribe to
comfortable consumerist assumptions about the defects of local
food systems along the lines of ‘vegetables-grown-in-heated-
polytunnels-in-Britain-have-a-higher-carbon-footprint-than-
ones-imported-from-Spain’ may be in for a shock about quite
how much those assumptions are set to be disrupted.15

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