[p2p-research] debate on open agriculture

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/21/09, Stan Rhodes <stanleyrhodes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Regarding diffusion of skill, the trend I see: technology and knowledge
> lowering barriers to entry so more people can choose from a larger pool of
> interests, and go farther in their handful of interests.  The skills are
> actually diffused in and across technology itself--shoulders of giants and
> all that.  If you look at hobbies, they may be increasingly diverse between
> people, but each person only has a handful.  There is variance, of
> course--some people have wider "interest pools" than others--but I think you
> can see the trend.  Even with incredibly low barriers to entry across a huge
> pool of possible activities, I strongly suspect we'll see specialization in
> only a handful per person.

That may well be, but it seems likely to me that the reduced capital
outlays and other entry barriers, and a shift in price as it becomes
impossible to externalize the real costsof agribusiness, means that
the mix will shift considerably toward home and neighborhood
production.  A great deal of division of labor can be achieved by
specialization at the neighborhood level--not only one person
producing specialty crops for a number of other families, but a
skilled seamstress sewing for the neighborhood (as opposed to a larger
number of families with under- or unused sewing machines gathering
dust, or the sewing being done indifferently well).

>  So, while you say there might be rational economic incentives for diffusion
> of skill in make-vs-buy, I'm not seeing those incentives with food or much
> else, because the strongest economic incentive is for a person to specialize
> in what interests them, with one or more of those skillsets being of high
> market value--their breadwinner.  I strongly suspect that manufacturing of
> the future will be similar, but I will save my alternate visions of the
> future of manufacturing for some other time.

> Regarding cities and food, the future will be far more dense than WW2 era,
> not less dense, which is good, because increased density tends to correlate
> with more power efficiency (less power used per capita).  I can't see many
> victory gardens in Tokyo or Hong Kong.

> While gardens aren't a very productive use of dense urban land, I could
> easily see edible landscaping throughout urban greenspaces (which need to be
> multi-purpose), and roof gardens (are they worth the cost and upkeep? no
> idea).

As a matter of fact, Havana and Shanghai produce a majority of their
vegetables, and China's urban population meets around 85% of its
vegetable needs through rooftop and vacant lot gardening.

However, I don't know if you have a garden (I do, and picked my
> first eggplant this weekend), but, I would be hard-pressed to produce 40-50%
> of in-season veggies.  Similar to the market gardeners you mentioned, we do
> have full-time specialized garderners here, whom you can pay to come in and
> take care of your garden for you if you live within their zone, and there's
> even a pooled-backyard CSA.

I've been gardening about ten years, from the time I first lived in a
rent house with a yard attached and gardening became feasible.   IMO
the learning curve is fairly rapid, for anyone who is reasonably
interested in learning, and capable of learning from his own
experience, from one year to the next.  I started out based on
memories of childhood gardening (in a small southern city, with
parents who grew up in the rural south and considered a garden an
expected part of life, relying heavily on chemical fertilizers and
pesticides), and a handful of books on organic gardening.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html