Are small farms really more productive than large farms? Or is this shonky reasoning? Is productivity the only measure?

There’s never a good time to be poor but it’s especially tough right now with extortionate rises in the price of basic food stuffs. In the past year, the prices of grains and vegetable oils have nearly doubled, and the price of rice has jumped by about half. No wonder people are rioting in Egypt and Haiti.

The UN Food Summit in Rome reached a limited deal last week (the sticking point was the thorny issue of biofuels). In a small concession to public opinion, the world’s leaders even toned down the menu - that is they didn’t serve foie gras and lobster like in 2002. How considerate!

The presence of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe was politically contentious – after all, the man has presided over the collapse of the country’s agricultural industry and widespread famine. But George Monbiot, writing in today’s The Guardian, says that Mugabe was right on one thing: small farms are more productive than large farms. Monbiot, for the record, did not say that he supported Mugabe and was at pains to point out that Mugabe has actually done the opposite of “democratising” land ownership.

Monbiot’s argument was more nuanced than that and he cites some quite interesting research. He writes:

“Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.”

I would be interested to know whether the studies looked at the size of the farm overall or the amount of land under cultivation. The latter would be a better basis of comparison. I have travelled to a lot of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and particularly to coffee growing regions. Small farms are of course socially very good but environmentally it’s less clear. A well-managed plot  using a well-designed organic farming system such as permaculture, is both productive and kind on the earth. But subsistence farms, where land pressure is intense, have a terrible impact.

In many parts of the world, deforestation is intense because land pressure is so great. Small holders cut down trees because they need the land to grow food – I saw many farms in Uganda that had been carved out of the forest in the past 20 years for example. By contrast, medium and large farms vary in their impact on the environment. Some of them use very destructive farming practices indeed, and they tend to use more chemicals on average. However, in my experience they often incorporate pockets of natural forest as well – I’ve seen this everywhere from Uganda to Nicaragua.

On a bigger farm, not every square inch of land is under cultivation, which makes the farm less productive per hectare but is good from the point of view of conservation. In order to tackle climate change and preserve biodiversity, we need to save forest, even forest fragments, so this quite important. As for whether a small or a large farm is more productive per square metre under cultivation, I don’t know the answer but I would like to see that research.

Another thought – presumably, if small farms are more productive than big farms, then gardens are more productive still. Another reason to have a garden, if you were not already persuaded by this previous post.

When I was a child, my family had a vegetable garden. I can vividly remember the dark green feathery tendrils of the carrot tops and the paler green ripple of the lettuce leaves, poking out from their bed of straw and compost. I took it for granted as a normal part of life, though if the truth be told I don’t think I was especially interested. When I was very small we had chickens as well and one of my favourite jobs was fetching the eggs, which always seemed like a mini Easter egg hunt (though with less chocolate).

Having a garden is a virtuous circle because, as well as helping to feed yourself - lovely fresh food with an infinitesimally small carbon footprint - you also have a green way to dispose of food waste, whether by composting, keeping a worm farm, or feeding to chickens. Food waste sent to landfill is a major environmental problem because it rots anaerobically and produces potent greenhouse gases like methane. By contrast, food waste that is returned to the soil in the form of compost actually locks CO2 into the soil, in a natural form of carbon sequestering. Some local government areas have separate food waste collections but this is rare.

In yesterday’s The Guardian, Michael Pollan, author of In Defence of Food, has written a passsionate riposte to the ‘why bother’ brigade - the argument that our environmental problems are so insurmountable and the actions we take as individuals are so futile that we’re all doomed anyway and may as well just enjoy the time we have left. I really like Pollan’s piece firstly because it’s inspiring rather than just plunging me further into despair and secondly because I think it advances quite a strong argument for the difference that individuals can make. There is the ripple effect - the idea of inspiring other people and creating a chain reaction of individual responses - and also the salient point that, while fixing the problem takes laws and money, it also takes changes to the way we live. Governments won’t act in any meaningful way until we do. It reminds me of the old Margaret Mead quote* about changing the world that invariably gets trotted out in arguments like these but it’s no less true for that.

In particular, Pollan suggests that as individuals we should make a single, meaningful contribution to the solution, and goes on to make the case for a vegetable garden. Did you know that during World War 2, victory gardens supplied as much as 40% of the produce Americans ate?

I recommend reading the piece in full but I have extracted a few quotes. He writes:

“Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

“A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilisers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

“Yet the sun still shines down on your garden, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organised vegetable patch (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden centre), you can grow the proverbial free lunch - CO2-free and money-free.”

He goes on point out there are physical and psychological benefits as well:

“You will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your gardenburning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labour that, having replaced physical labour with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.

“Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself - that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need.”

Finally:

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”

It’s been many years since I have been involved in growing my own food. The closest I have come in recent years has been keeping a few pots of herbs on my kitchen window sill that died when I went away for a month. However, it’s certainly a family tradition. My mother and several of my aunts keep extensive vegetable gardens and two of my aunts are trained designers and teachers of permaculture - a type of organic gardening that relies on design to mimic natural eco-systems and create self-sustaining systems. One runs an organic gardening supplies, Green Harvest, based in Queensland, while the other has a garden design business in Cardiff, Edible Landscaping. My aunt in Scotland also has a rather lovely garden near Inveraray on the West Coast and last year I went up north to pick blackcurrants and make jam.

Currently I live in a rented third-storey flat in London so the opportunities for me to either grow my own food, or avoid sending waste to landfill are limited. Friends of mine in north London have recently acquired an allotment, a UK scheme to give city-dwellers a patch of land for growing their own food. I don’t think I could devote the time to an allotment - it’s a major hobby - and I don’t drive so it would have to be literally around the corner from my house in order to make it feasible for me. But I am hoping that my next home might have a small courtyard garden or balcony so I can at least grow some herbs and flowers and keep a worm farm for my food scraps.

Sinc I don’t have a garden, I do possibly the next best thing, which is to buy locally grown, organic fruit and vegetables. I order a weekly box from Abel and Cole and I’ve always had a very good experience with them, both for fruit and vegetables and also for dairy, bread, coffee, meat and fish, cleaning products (I could almost do a complete weekly shop with them!). It’s very reasonable - we spend £25 a week with them and our total weekly grocery bill for two people is about £40. I particularly like that I can set likes and dislikes - useful in winter to control the amount of potatoes, parsnip and swede I let them send me! I’ve heard very good things about Riverford Organics as well

Do you have a vegetable garden? Do you grow any of your own food? What environmental factors, if any, do you consider when shopping for food?

* The Margaret Mead quote I am referring to is of course: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” I’m sure you’ve heard that one before.

Coffee and café culture has reached unprecedented popularity in the Western world and coffee drinkers tend to be passionate about their beverage of choice. Given the level of emotional commitment, it’s not surprising that coffee drinkers would also be increasingly concerned with the welfare of the farmers, as shown by the rising prominence of schemes such as Fair Trade.

Black Gold, a new feature documentary on the subject of the vast chasm between the incomes of coffee farmers and the profits of large coffee companies, screened on More 4 last night. I missed it but it’s playing again this Saturday and I hope to see it as I find coffee a truly fascinating subject. I worked as a volunteer in a coffee growing region of Costa Rica when I was 20 and in my travel writing career I have visited coffee farms in Uganda, Tanzania and Papua New Guinea (you can see some of the resulting articles on my travel site Roaming Tales). There is no doubt that coffee can be an immensely powerful social force and that more can be done to encourage this.

Millions of people around the world make their living in some way from coffee (such as this family in the PNG Highlands, pictured left). It’s the lifeblood of communities in many developing countries, even when it’s not the biggest export. (Coffee is tiny in PNG compared with mining or logging, for example, but it’s actually ordinary people who benefit). The average person with a small plot of land will grow food for the family and a few coffee trees to bring in cash for school fees, medicine and so on. In the 1980s, when coffee prices were high, small growers could even send their children to private school and university on the proceeds from coffee. Now there is greater global competition and prices are much lower but it’s still a crop of immense social significance.

I am curious to see what the documentary itself is like because quite honestly, I find the arguments put forward by producers on The Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog to be somewhat simplistic.

“Farmers we’ve spoken to find it patronising that huge corporations give money to charitable projects while they pay farmers an extremely low price. ‘Why not pay us a decent price’, they say, ‘and we’ll decide where to spend our money’.

Real change will only come when countries like Ethiopia capture the value-chain of coffee. Not just growing and picking beans but processing, roasting and exporting the finished product on to the shelves of our supermarkets.

Until then, the only way to make informed choices is to know how much is going back to the grower.”

Well, yes and no. Coffee companies spend money on aid and charity is because it’s tax deductible and it makes a nice corporate social responsibility story. However, it’s also because it’s practical and possible. Coffee is a commodity traded on an exchange so the base prices are not directly under the control of anyone, from coffee exporter to coffee shop chain. There are circumstances when it is possible to pay higher prices but it’s not easy to do.

There is no doubt that it would be nice for farmers to get a better deal but it’s also important to recognise the reasons why they don’t. You can’t change something without properly understanding the nature of the problem.

1. Moving up the value chain is not easy

It’s true that most coffee exporting companies are foreign owned and I would welcome it if countries such as Ethiopia started their own. It would benefit the Ethiopian economy, though it would not necessarily mean a better deal for farmers, unless the export company was actually owned by a farmers’ co-operative and the co-operative was actually well run.

It’s not practical to say that Ethiopian companies set up as roasters - and this is the most profitable part of the chain. Coffee loses flavour after roasting so this needs to be done as close to the consumer as possible. Also roasters are usually buying coffee from multiple sources, not just one country (single origin coffee is a niche).

2. The actual bean is only a small part of the value

It’s also true that to make an informed choice you need to know how much is going back to the grower. But you also need to know how much should go back to the grower. What are the beans actually worth, given how vastly different they are to an actual cup of coffee?

How much should the coffee exporter get for their work in travelling all over the country to buy the coffee, then the wet processing, the drying, the sorting, then selling to buyers abroad? Bear in mind that they employ a lot of local staff (such as these women at an export company in Uganda, pictured left) and take the business risk because if they can’t sell the coffee, they lose money.

How much should the roaster be paid for sourcing the beans, roasting them, packaging them, marketing and advertising, liaising with retailers and coffee shops, not to mention the higher overheads that come with a base in Europe or North America?

How much should a coffee shop in London get, bearing in mind profits will only come once they’ve covered the extortionate cost of rent in this city, electricity, insurance and wage costs?

3. Coffee is a commodity

It’s a phrase that’s often bandied around but I mean that in the literal sense. The price of coffee fluctuates according to commodity traders on the coffee exchanges in New York or London (depending on whether you are talking about Robusta or Arabica). It’s exactly the same process that sets the price for wheat and oil, for example. When coffee prices collapse it’s usually because of over-supply - countries that never previously grew coffee such as Vietnam now produce vast quantities of the stuff.

4. Don’t blame the coffee exporter

I have been privileged enough to meet coffee growers, coffee exporters and roasters and understand a bit about the economics of each piece of the puzzle.

If you are a coffee exporter it is very difficult to offer a higher price than the market rate because you have to be able to sell the beans on to a roaster in Europe or the US or wherever the end market is. You probably have a competitor just down the road more than willing to undercut your prices. Coffee exporters don’t make huge margins - the roasters (who brand and sell the coffee) sit at the most profitable part of the value chain.

However, in order to convince the roasters to pay more for their coffee, there needs to be an assurance that the money would benefit growers not just exporters, and that it could pass the cost on to consumers in some way, either through a quality premium or through an appeal to the social conscience. Certification schemes play a valuable role on both counts.

5. Quality premiums are hard to get

Coffee exporters can sometimes attract a premium - which is passed on to growers - for coffee of a particular quality but that means hard work and risk for both the coffee exporter and the grower. The export companies have to work with farmers - visiting farms all over the country in person to teach them pruning, harvesting and drying techniques. They have to convince the farmers that it’s worth their while to make the extra effort. They run the risk that another exporter or a middleman will buy the crop before them and cash in on the work. They also run the risk that they will pay the premium to farmers and then the roasters will reject the coffee and not pay the promised price, leaving them out of pocket.

If the premium is specifically for organic coffee there is also the risk the farmers breaking the rules and being de-certified. (Aid organisations can also be incredibly unhelpful here - I know of a case in Mount Elgon in Uganda where after several years of hard work on the part of farmers and a local cooperative, the area had been collectively certified for organic. Apparently USAid then showed up and, rather than go around the other side of the mountain where the coffee farmers were not yet organised, they muscled in and drove around handing out free chemicals to organic coffee farmers).

The best quality coffee comes when red cherry is picked off the tree and sent to the factory for processing on the same day. It ensures the coffee is fresh and the processing is controlled and consistent. But most coffee farms are remote and it can take days for the coffee to reach the exporter. So farmers need to dry the coffee cherry to parchment stage themselves - we’re talking smallholders with a family to feed and the coffee is exposed to the elements and often dried on the ground - if they’re really lucky they might have a tarpaulin, which reduces the contact with the ground but does nothing to protect it from the chickens and small children running across the beans or the rain and wind. It’s going to be a hard sell to get a premium price for this coffee!

6. Growing coffee is not a full-time job

The prices that coffee farmers get vary wildly. In Uganda, where land pressure is high, a farmer (such as this one, pictured left) might only have half an acre of land and he has to grown food to feed his family as well as coffee. He might earn $US200 per year from coffee to support a family of nine - although he is likely to own his land and grow enough food to feed his family, that still does not leave much surplus for school fees, medicine, clothing, mosquito nets and so on. In PNG, a vast country with only five million people, the income from coffee is closer to $US2,000 per year for an individual farmer, though he might be supporting his brothers’ families as well.

However it is worth pointing out that nowhere, except on the large corporate estates, is coffee the main activity. Coffee farmers spend most of their time growing food and generally only grow as much coffee as they can personally cope with. The annual income is low but it’s not a fair comparison to look at it as a wage as it’s not a full-time job.

7. Certification schemes do work

The main problem with certification schemes is that there so many of them. In the UK we’re most familiar with Fair Trade and organics, but there’s also Rainforest Alliance, Utz Certified (formerly Utz Kapeh), and a host of others.. Certification pays off with higher prices but it costs time and money to get certified and you have to take a punt on which scheme is best. Fortunately, if you meet the standards for one, it’s usually fairly easy to meet the standards for another, and increasingly you can get the same inspector to conduct multiple certifications.

Fair Trade focuses on the social side. The idea is that it pays a minimum that is above the cost of production so that even if commodity coffee prices fall dramatically, the farmer is guaranteed an income. The rest of the time, the Fair Trade price is always a certain margin above the traded price - and there is also a social premium that is invested back in the community (and the community decides where it is spent).

Rainforest Alliance has some social criteria but is also very concerned with the environmental side. Deforestation is a big issue in countries such as Uganda, mostly because of land pressure, and Rainforest Alliance is concerned to ensure that coffee farmers keep shade trees that provide bird and wildlife habitat.

Utz has similarities to both but is a bigger name in mainland Europe than the UK.

Finally, organic certification is primarily about how the coffee is grown rather than social justice, though many organic products are also Fair Trade and vice versa. To be certified organic, the grower has to show not just that they don’t use chemical fertilisers and pesticides but also that they are improving the soil naturally. (Organic farming is a great way to lock carbon into the soil for exactly this reason). I was really impressed with the small organic farm I saw in Uganda - it had nothing to do with my hosts, but was just a small farmer with a few coffee trees who used manure from the cows and droppings from the rabbit hutch (pictured) as natural fertiliser, and also had lots of leaves to mulch the ground, which locks in water and soil nutrients. Elsewhere I saw lots of farms where the soil was overly weeded and quite bare so it was quite a striking difference.

Choosing certified coffee is a great way to ensure that more of the money goes back to the farmer and also that communities and the natural environment also benefit. However, there are some concerns about quality - my favourite coffee shop in London is Monmouth Coffee Company, which is also a roaster. They don’t buy certified Fair Trade because they have been unhappy with the quality of samples in the past, but they have their own rigorous standards. At the other end of the scale, Nespresso, which is the premium brand of Nestlé, also does not embrace Fair Trade but has its own AAA programme, focusing on both quality and sustainability. The problem is that an internal scheme is not as transparent and accountable for consumers, but it’s a case of deciding whether you trust the companies in question.

The Black Gold post is highly critical of chains such as Starbucks. So am I, but for different reasons.

“These companies fail to disclose how much they pay the coffee growers and attempts by the media to find actual prices have largely failed. But they continue to hi-jack the language of fair trade and sustainability.”

The reason I don’t like coffee chains is because they generally sell overpriced crappy coffee. Starbucks buys some of the best coffee in the world but as far as I’m concerned they don’t make it well - you have to order a double just to get any taste at all. And Starbucks is miles better than some of its chain competitors like Caffe Nero and Costa.

But say what you like about Starbucks and their ilk, I don’t think they should be criticised for their stance on fair trade and sustainability. They don’t “hi-jack” the words - they sell certified Fair Trade coffee and the fact that they do this benefits farmers and educates consumers at the same time.

The Guardian yesterday devoted the cover of its feature supplement G2 and four pages within it to the fact that its women’s editor Kira Cochrane has decided to lose weight. The tagline on the cover is “the feminist dieter” and Cochrane is also going to be writing a fortnightly column about it.

I must admit, I’m a bit puzzled by this. Firstly, I don’t understand why the paper gave so much space to it. G2 is usually full of smart, interesting, topical features that tell me something new. And indeed the article by Rory Carroll on the Sandalistas in the same issue is a good example. To me, the headline ‘woman goes on a diet’ or even ‘feminist goes on a diet’ or ‘women’s editor goes on a diet’ is worth maybe a one-off column at best. But, hey, I’m not the editor.

The other thing that puzzles me is that after reading the piece I can’t figure out why there was an implicit assumption that it’s somehow un-feminist to diet. Cochrane writes well and I enjoyed reading her work but in the end it didn’t really say very much. I already know that if you eat a lot and don’t do too much exercise then weight gain is the natural result. And I already know that while it can feel liberating not to care about piling on the pounds, it’s a temporary satisfaction as life then gets harder in other ways (Cochrane talks about feeling “sluggish”, not being able to sit comfortably on public transport and not being able to go hand-gliding with her friend because she was worried about the size of the harnesses).

Feminism isn’t about being fat. There is nothing feminist about wilfully pursuing a path that leads to health problems and a curbed ability to take part in the many activities that life has to offer. What I would hope feminism offers is freedom from self loathing and a more a positive relationship with our bodies based on self nurture. We are not defined by our bodies but we are not divorced from them either.

I don’t disagree with anything Cochrane has said or the conclusions she has reached and I wish her well on the weight loss journey, which I’m sure will not be easy. However, none of it seemed particularly new or surprising to me. I’m still annoyed by it being given so much space - it implies that she is being some kind of rebel in being both a feminist and wanting to lose weight, and that’s just not the case.

The best and most simplest nutrition advice I’ve heard was Michael Pollan’s famous seven words: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”

I heard on the Today show this morning that the UK Government wants to make cookery compulsory in schools for children up until the age of 14.  The theory is that teaching children about food and food preparation will both prepare them for adult life and help tackle the nation’s burgeoning obesity crisis.

I think this is a great idea but I’m concerned about the execution. Cookery needs to be taught properly and I’m not convinced that it is. I’ve just come back from visiting family in Cardiff and my 11-year-old cousin, who has just started high school, has cookery once a week. On Sunday his dad was running around Tesco buying stir-fry ingredients since there were no bean sprouts or five spice in the house.

The idea was that they would make the stir-fry in cookery class but they had to bring the vegetables in already chopped up because of the health and safety risk. So either they would buy a packet of pre-chopped stir-fry vegetables from the supermarket, or they or their parents would chop it up at home. All that would happen in class was that they would stir the vegetables around in a wok or pan with some oil and spice.

Another class involved learning how to ‘make’ pizza. The children were instructed to bring a supermarket-bought pizza base, some pre-grated cheese, tomato paste, ham and pineapple chunks. They then had to arrange the toppings on top of the pizza and bake it in the oven. There were no herbs or garlic and everything was preprepared. My cousin, who loves to cook at home and is probably a bit more advanced than this, asked if he could make his own pizza base. (He would make it at home and then bring that to school instead). The teacher said no, as she thought that would be too much trouble. He did anyway, using his mum’s bread maker, and half-baked it at home and of course the teacher didn’t even notice.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to take shortcuts, but it’s a good idea to learn how to do it for yourself at least once, and I don’t think the kids are going to learn that much from arranging some very boring toppings on a pre-made pizza base. To be honest, the supermarkets do a pretty nice line in pre-made pizza with the toppings already on, so if you’re going to take a short-cut you may as well buy the whole thing. Or at least do some more interesting toppings.

I did one semester of cookery in high school. We did that for six months and then sewing for six months in the first year of high school; after that it was optional and I never took it as an elective. But even in that very first year of high school, when I was the same age my cousin is now, we made more challenging dishes. These included hamburgers (we made the beef patties from scratch), scrambled eggs, vegetable casserole,  apple crumble, and pastry making (which resulted in a jam roll). We had to chop vegetables for the casserole and that was done in class, under supervision.

The other thing that bothers me is that there seems to be no discussion of seasonality and locality. Telling kids to buy pineapple and bean sprouts in the middle of a Welsh winter seems a peculiar thing to do when it could be a really good teaching point to talk about what can be sourced locally.

The Government is consulting with the public on what eight dishes children should learn to make in school. I think as well as learning eight dishes and the basics of nutrition, they should be taught about where food comes from, how their food choices affect the world around them, how a recipe can be spun in different ways to create new dishes, and creative things to do with leftovers.

My eight dishes would include spaghetti bolognese with a vegetarian alternative, nachos or tacos, frittata or baked omelette, roast dinner (this would require an extended session), soup (made from something in season, eg. pumpkin or leek and potato), cakes, cookies or brownies, curry, and maybe casserole (this could be about using leftovers). I would emphasise learning a variety of techniques rather than dishes.

Do you agree with the government proposal, which would see kids learn cookery up until the fourth year of high school? What eight dishes would you nominate? What other concepts or techniques should they learn? What is your experience with school cookery, either as a child or as a parent?