Well There‘s Your Problem
Hosted by Justin Roczniak and Liam McAnderson
Original podcast
fucking eggs! comes out of their fucking arses!full episode on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/122067171
4,330 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
Right. So yeah, I want to talk about farming. I've sprinkled in actually a couple of mini actual engineering disasters, you know, your problems. So, you know, bonus listeners will won't feel let out when I'm just like chattering about farming, come and bullshit like that. But before we get to all that, I do want to do a little bit of, you know, self criticism. I think it's important, you know, Maoist as we may or may not be. So next slide please.
We're not bud.
Well, well, well, my dad is. I am not.
In in reference to the previous episode, because I saw there was some, you know, controversy about that. This is a German man. You will not convince me otherwise. You show me the long form birth certificate and until I've seen the proof, this is a German man. Shut the fuck up. Next slide, please.
Uh huh.
So why are we here? Apart from that, I want to talk about farming. So over the Christmas break, my partner went to see her family for a few days and I was left with nothing better to do. So I watched all three seasons of Clarkson's Farm, available on Amazon. Don't watch it. It's actually actively bad for you. It's a terrible, terrible show.
So sorry. Yeah.
My main problem with it.
The worst show in the world.
I mean, it's history's greatest monster. So, you know, second greatest monster. So it's, it's not quite the, quite the same as the other shows that are terrible. But the main thing that my problem with it is especially season one, he does get a few things right about modern farming within a British context, but also in a more sort of Western context. But it is essentially an entertainment product and he is German Clarkson is a terrible fucking human being who, you know, this is a bonus, right? And this recorded in the US. So I can say whatever the fuck I like, right?
Yeah.
He did buy the farm purely for like tax avoidance reasons.
Yes. Yes. He did. He, yeah, he, he admitted it at the time.
He literally said it in print. We can be action for it.
Yeah, he admitted at the time, oh yeah, borders, a tax dodge. And now, you know, when there were farm protests going on about inheritance tax in the in the UK said, no, actually, I'm a really real farmer. It's like, no, you're not. You're just a guy who wants to give a bunch of give a bunch of wealth in form of land to his children. And, you know, he now he pretends that he's an actual farmer. The real problem with farming, with modern farming in general, is like, basically, it is a system that is designed to ignore two basic things. All natural system like water, biodiversity, you know, the climate, all that stuff, as well as a sort of production system that is stuck in the 1950s and refuses to evolve for
many reasons that we'll get into during the course of this episode. Next slide, please.
I will say, in Clarkson's defense, at least in the American context, land speculation is like 50% of the farming business. So.
Oh, it's a huge thing in the UK.
Huge thing everywhere, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's it's.
You can be a farmer and just do land speculation. Let's be real.
Most of them do.
I just want to reemphasize that point that Rob made there. It's very much like we are, because it's true for absolutely so many things. We have 1950s capitalist production system that just assumes the planet will just be like this infinitely without any downsides. And that includes things like the availability, as Rob said, the availability of things like water and soil nutrients and general biodiversity and the absolutely critical invertebrate fauna that keep soil alive. My dad is a land use ecologist, so I will be, yes.
Excellent.
I have thoughts on this, yes. This has come through nutrition and all of his life has done research into this stuff. So, yes, I might share a few things, although I will shut up mostly.
We'll be fine if we just send out a few more boats and discover some new continents, you know, probably beyond the ice wall, you know.
I'll be on the ice wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, obviously, dude, you want to get the expedition ready? Or is that my job?
Well, you talk about this, but like China has, China's doing this. They've, they've gone to, they're already going to, to Eastern Africa. And for example, they're all over Madagascar.
Yeah, yeah.
Plugging it with like peanuts and just like destroying like, just like two seasons and you're out type situation where there's obliterating thousands of square kilometers of, of, of Bay about beautiful Bayabab terrain for the benefit of peanut growth. Because China's doing that. They're, they're doing the, the kind of the capitalist sort of colonial expansion thing.
It is colonial extraction for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the other reason, the more, slightly more serious reason, next slide, please, that I wanted to talk about this is this shit. This was last year, end of last year in the UK, there was a whole bunch of farmer protests all over Europe last year and the year before. And I think the year before that, they pretty much happened like clockwork. And every time I see the worst people in the world talking about the same thing, which essentially the right wing, the fascists are gearing up to make farming and farmers specifically a blood and soil issue. You know, it's very, it's a very emotive subject. It's, you know, you want pretty back British farming, back French farming, you know, small farms are important, da da da. Whether they are or not, I'm kind
of agnostic about that. But like, a lot of right wing people placed a lot of stock on farming in particular, because it is, it has that, like I said, it's literal blood and soil shit. It's, it's, you know, it's a, it's a national security issue. It has that. And my, one of my main problems with it is, is like liberals have no answer for this crisis because they created it and liberals never have an answer for anything. And leftists, I think in general, don't think nearly enough about food production. We tend to think about industrial production, unions, that kind of stuff, which is all very cool. But we tend to ignore the bit, you know, that says where the food comes from, because every time somebody on sort of our side of the fence talks about where the food comes from, then everybody starts yelling about collective farming and, you know, things of that nature. And then
it all gets very messy. So this is why I want to, the other reason why I want to talk about this is because. A couple of years ago, during the Brexit debate, a very similar thing happened to the UK fishing industry. All of a sudden, they were national champions. They were very important and, you know, and then the second, the people who wanted Brexit got what they wanted. The fish, like the people who, the fishing industry got dumped over the side, pardon the pun, and then, you know, were immediately sold out in the post Brexit trade deal and were just kind of forgotten about. And I think farming is really important. I think farming is interesting as well. So like,
It is. I have a point to note, which is a couple of things. Number one, if you're a farmer who can afford that tractor, you are not likely to be running a small farm because that is an extremely expensive bit of kit.
Yeah, they have the same issue in the States. I think that should kind of be obvious. But yeah, we have the, this is, I think the myth of the sort of down home farmer, which is, you know,
Yes.
It's all massive agribusinesses and shit. And what's the really big one, Roz? The privately owned one?
Cargo.
Cargo, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, cargo is more of a trader and less of a farmer, but it's, we'll get into it. There are slides about cargo coming up later for people who like their agri-trading things.
My, my, my second point on this is, if, if you've got time to go to London in your tractor, again, no, my grandfather still farming in his, his 80th year. And how, again, big farm, because he does not have time to do that. He could go on holiday for two weeks every now and then, but he does not have time to do that and certainly didn't when he was running the farm in its totality because he did mixed arable and cattle. He had no time to do stuff like that. So, yeah.
It does seem like whenever there's one of these big, highly publicized protests where they roll the tractors into like London or Paris and then they spray manure on something. It's like, it's only like huge farmers protesting whatever the latest EU sustainability regulation is.
The key thing is, this is not like, this is emphasizing Rob's point is that this is getting hijacked by. A certain set in a certain class of of people and of farmer. But just to emphasize Rob's point, so many farmers are who have lots of challenges were kind of having those challenges sort of either amplified but for the wrong reasons or ignored by some of this sort of, you know, money based stuff that we saw in these recent arguments. And yeah, so yeah, Rob, yes, yes.
Yeah. Essentially, and I also think like a lot of farmers in the UK, in Europe, and also in America have very legitimate reasons to be incredibly pissed about how they have been treated in the last, I don't know, 20, 30, maybe 40 years. Like, they have legitimate complaints. In this specific case, when it comes to paying inheritance tax on your farm, that's not one of them. Shut the fuck up. Like, that is not one of them. Anyway, so that's sort of the table setting. One more thing. Next slide, please.
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
For once.
Doing it. We're doing it. Yeah, we will have to slap a seizure warning on that. In all seriousness.
It's, I will say, when I put this together, this looked a lot less violent than I can see that it is now.
It looks like a pool of boiling blood with the words in general.
Rob, this is what you've manifested. Okay.
So this is the big in general warning, because I'm going to say a whole bunch of things which are generally overall statistically mostly true. But because farming is incredibly unique and every farm is genuinely different, the soil aspect, what you grow, how you grow, what your market is, it's so different. I cannot speak to every farm. Everything I say, somebody's going to be able to say, well, or Gareth will be able to say, my grandfather's farm doesn't work this way. And it's very different. And you don't know what you're talking about. My statements, I think, overall are in general true. That there's an immense variability that that like if if we talked about individual farms, we would literally be recording until the end of recorded time. And, you know, we can't quite make it like that, mainly because I like to go to bed at some point.
Nope, nope. You are the bomb callers, tightening, Rob. You are you are a hostage indefinitely. Sorry, buddy.
Good to know. The other, the other in general is like, I will mainly be talking about European, Western European and American farming about which I know the most. I know that leaves out like most of the planet. I'm well aware of it. But the thing is, I don't know shit about farm systems in Southeast Asia, or what China's doing, or like, most of Sub-Saharan Africa. So I, I won't talk about it because I simply don't know. Like, that's the only way I can, I can talk about it. The third in general thing is, I'm mainly going to be talking about arable farming, so things that grow. I'm going to try to talk about cows less, because again, I have to put some restrictions on this already too big a topic.
And again, it's not something that I don't, I don't know enough about to speak with full confidence in. So, you know, that's, those are, that's the seizure warning, and that's the in general warning in in advance. All right. So let's get started with the very tiniest of history lessons. Next slide, please.
I just wanted to, sorry, Rob, sorry. I just wanted to say, chip in to to kind of support that point. In the UK, there are like around about 60,000 farm businesses, around about that number. And only, only a third of them are like, small, like two thirds of them are either like, medium or large or extremely large. So just to give an idea of scale, like, hopefully, that that shows how diverse a, a, a, a, kind of the map is just in the UK, which is a tiny, stupid, fucking little island.
Yeah, I mean, that, and then like, even then, like, what the UK would consider a large to very large farm is like a small one in the Great Plains. So like, yeah, you know, you're, it's very difficult to be sort of broad about this, but I'm gonna do my best. Anyway, very briefly, without doing the entire history of agriculture and all together, a lot of the history of humanity and what we've done, you know, since we stopped doing hunter gathering is sitting, sitting down in one place and then having. Increasingly fewer people needed to work the land so most people could go out and do other things, you know, like do podcasts and other important, important work.
Apart from that, you know, that's the general evolution. It's also a general point. We don't do that anymore because farm work by hand sucks fucking ass. Like you may have like romantic visions of like, oh, but I have like 12 tomato plants in my backyard and I really like picking them. It sounds so romantic. It's like, yeah, it's really good fun, but most like commercial horticulture things have like a hundred thousand tomatoes and you have to pick them all.
Wait, wait until you're, you gotta walk four and a half miles to pick all the tomatoes and bent over the whole time.
Yes, yes. There, there, there's a reason. We'll talk about farm labor in a little bit, but there's a reason why, you know, that's, that is a job when like, when, uh, like societies reach a certain level of economic sophistication and the income goes high enough. There's a reason that you get very, very few people who still want to pick the strawberries, uh, slice the asparagus, do all that stuff. There's a very good reason for that and why, you know, the, the people who still do that in Europe and America are among the most, are usually illegal and usually exploited because there's a reason we don't do that shit anymore ourselves.
And even putting migrant labor.
Good, mind.
No, it doesn't make it good. Even putting migrant labor to one side. There's a reason why, like child labor, by which I mean your kids are still doing a huge amount of farm work because if you didn't use your kids, the, the, the child labor to do a lot of the farm stuff, like hoeching bales around if you're an arable farmer and stuff, the business wouldn't work. The, the numbers wouldn't work. Like you, you wouldn't be able to make the thing work. Um, I also want to talk about this guy's nipple.
I also noticed that, yeah.
It is enormous. And I think we need to just address this.
Mommy milkers. And that's okay.
Absolutely.
I have man boobs. I have.
Specifically the nipple though. It's extremely.
Oh, like, like a, like a.
An imposing presence on the, on this.
Like gum drops on pepperonis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So wanted to correct something from earlier. Uh, in early agriculture podcasts would, would have been called oral tradition.
That's true.
How do you think we got Torah, man?
Return with a V. Yeah, that's.
Torah was the first podcast.
The first podcast. Yeah, that's.
First podcast transcript.
Anyway, in, in the West, I have to, I'll say that a few more times, just in case, we have, historically speaking, we're living in a madly unprecedented period of history, which is food abundance. Food abundance is the most, one of the most uncommon things you will ever find in recorded history. We have been living in a, a sort of world novelty of the last three, maybe four generations now, where food is abundant, it's available, it's cheap, it's safe. And it is simply there, you can go to any fucking gas station, supermarket, you know, wherever, wherever you go, there's like food available for very little money. Bit more money now than like five years ago, but you know, in general, it's, it's.
Bro, he's gonna, he's gonna lower the price of eggs, bro. You don't get it, bro.
Why does it cost so much to order a taxi for my burrito then?
Because your gig economy, oh. Not even as a joke.
It's, it's because the economies of having the guy get on the tractor from Gareth's farm and drive the burrito to your house. It's just like, you know, you have to ship the thing, you have to get it to Pennsylvania, you know?
My grandfather's been friends up in Marks and Spencer's, it's the good quality stuff.
Philadelphia is in Pennsylvania, Rob, you, you were right.
Don't worry about it.
Anyway, uh, one more caveat, I, I have, I'll keep doing these. I know there are food deserts, especially in urban environments where there are no supermarkets. You see those like corner stores or bodegas, if you're, if you live in New York City, which I hear are filled with cats, cats are cool, but like in general, overall, it is, next time you go to supermarket, like especially in that, like the fruit and veg in the bakery aisles, just like sort of take a second to, to genuinely marvel at the modern miracle that there is that much food year round available for you to purchase at relatively low prices. It is like, you know, that, that line about how you would have killed a medieval peasant with a Dorito, it's that, but like you would have shown them the fucking produce aisle in Kroger's,
like there, you would have been mopping brains up off the floor for hours after that.
Oh yeah, you know, you could, you could buy an avocado in January and they're like, they don't even know what that is.
Ross, how do you say that word, bud?
Avocado.
That's okay, an avocado, yeah.
I was wondering, I was wondering if you were asking about that or noting that Rob said Krogers instead of Kroger.
Yeah, Rob, Rob gets a pass because he lives in Switzerland.
I was trying to be localized.
No, no, that's, that's actually, that is a localized version because a lot of people, even though it's called Kroger, they call it Krogers.
Yeah. It's like my parents calling it Giants, yeah.
Yeah, and, and, uh, on a Wegmans is, Wegmans is with an S actually, so, yeah.
Yeah. Look, now that Nova has canonically died in, you know, the, the Glasgow storms, it's, you know, all I'm sensing is, you know, there may be an opportunity coming up on, well, there's a problem. And I thought, you know, if I sounded more like a native.
I, yeah, it's, um, I, I, what's really great is that that food, that, that food abundance is going to continue at infinite for our society. And there's no, there's no major kind of oncoming threat to that. I'm really glad about that.
No, no.
Cue the last slide.
Again, you just gotta discover a couple more continents beyond the ice wall.
Oh, yeah. Well, you know, there might be.
There's really delicious food out there.
Uh, you know, I mean, there is every chance that as the, you know, the thunderous melt in the polar ice cap retreats that, you know, Greenland could become like an actual like farming hub. So, you know, they, there's hope for at least for America, I suppose.
I fear that we lose more than we gain, though. I'm just imagining how much current agricultural land would become desert, uh, at that point.
Well, we'll get there. That's, that's towards the end. Um, that's the scary.
Oh, no, I mean, obviously, that's never gonna happen, of course. I'm just making some random stuff up. That's junk.
Funny counter argument to, uh, you know, global warming. Oh, we'll just move north. Well, all the lands there, all the land there is shit.
So the Canadian shield is not so good for you. Yeah.
The other, I wouldn't necessarily say it like it's a problem. It's more like sort of an evolution is that we don't just have like more people overall on the planet than we ever have before, but specifically we have more and more middle class people. China, India, Brazil, you know, other places, the demand for food, especially different foods at high standards is projected to increase for the next 40 years, if not more, you know, depending on how the income gets distributed in the next 50 years. But like overall, there will be more people with more disposable income who don't want like just the food they grow locally. They want, you know, avocados in January, they want, you know,
I want truffle in my microwaveable macaroni cheese.
Terrifying future where, you know, Indian people become middle class and they start replacing all the delicious food with like Wonder Bread and boiled chicken breasts.
Yeah, like all the vada powders get converted into just, did you get rid of vada powders? And they just become burgers. Oh, no, no, don't do that. My God.
We have to avoid this future.
So the other thing, which is also because now we live in a period of superabundance. So that is next slide, please. That is, it's not necessarily didn't start with her. I know environment, the environment and conservationism is much older, Theodore Roosevelt and national parks, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the things that we do now that we have at least much more conversations about that people like recognize more overall is that like farmers aren't just farmers anymore. We ask them or we demand of them that they grow not just food, but they protect the environment. They do good stuff for water. They do good stuff for, for the soil. They have a duty of care and forced subsidized or otherwise. But like, we have reached a point of our understanding that if we don't look after
the underlying ecosystems that, you know, make farming possible, clean air, clean water, good soil, all that stuff, we'll get into it. There is no farming and there is no future and the whole thing gets very fucked. But essentially like this, if in certainly in terms of farming, this is new, like the, the first real environmental regulations on like the pillar, the pillar two, which is the common agricultural policy is like that comes from the mid eighties, maybe 1990s. That's Europe. I know America is different. How like America doesn't really do like that kind of protection.
I was gonna say it's kind of sad because yeah, it's absolutely new and certainly regulatory terms absolutely new. But in a way, it's rediscovering how we did farming originally, which was much more subsistence based and probably and actually, there's a lot of indigenous populations around the planet understand that actually you trash the land that you rely on for food and that then you have no food. And so in a way, as we've discovered, again, thanks dad for all the research you do and your colleagues do on this, as we've discovered, like you do the trash of the land, your business ends, you have no farm.
I am pleased to announce for one second, I hate to cut in, actually, no, I don't, fuck you, but Nova's coming. We are not starting over. She's just gonna have to join.
And it'll be fine. It's a bonus. The hogs love the, they love us for being real. It's fine. Yeah, so I was just reinforcing that point, but it's interesting. It's almost like we're, it's like regulation is kind of forcing farmers to rediscover something that we as a species knew just, you know, 1500 years ago.
I have a certain amount, I mean, I think that's valid. I have a certain amount of skepticism about like rediscovering the wisdom of the ancients with regards to like farming.
There's a certain extent to which, okay, we could go back to like, you know, the more sustainable agriculture. Well, the aquifer underneath the Midwest is still gonna get drained.
Well, spoilers for later slides, but we will be talking about the Midwest aquifer.
Oh, God. No.
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