Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 8 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
If this does not happen though, and if—as most people are in the habit of thinking—'they' find a way to keep a hundred million motor cars roaring along the roads after the oil has dried up (whoever 'they' are), there is still a case for far more self-sufficiency of communities and individuals. If there is fast and cheap land transport it is not necessary for a jeweler to live in Birmingham, a potter in Stoke-on-Trent or a cutler in Sheffield. Such craftsmen can live, if they wish, right out in the country, and practice their crafts in their own homes. Their raw materials can be got to them cheaply, and cheaply they can send their finished articles away. With unlimited cheap transport the whole need for crowding people into industrial cities fades away, and more and more city people will leave the big cities (which will become more and more unendurable anyway as more and more ignorant people try to crowd into them) and set up their workshops in pleasant places, and many of these people will eventually get the idea of being at least partially self-supporting.
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There is no good economic reason why they should be self-supporting: a craftsman living in the country need not even grow a cabbage if he doesn't want to—he can simply produce enough of the produce of his own industry to buy the food he needs. But a surprising number of such craftsmen find that they want to be at least partially self-supporting. A surprising number of the more intelligent people who have passed through the big-city-industrial stage are reacting against it: they want to advance to a more interesting and self-sufficient kind of life. After all, specialization may be economic, but it is terribly boring. I am a writer, but if I wrote enough hours a day to buy everything I and my family need I would write myself into the ground. I would quickly become bored and unhealthy. As it is, I write for half my working day, and during the rest of my time work mostly out of doors, growing and producing much that we eat and use, thus keeping happy and fit. Economics is a great science, but it falls down flat on its face when it tries to equate all good with money. It is inefficient, any agricultural economist will tell you, for me to hand-milk a cow. But what if I like hand-milking a cow? What is the economist going to say about that? Has any economist ever tried to measure the 'efficiency' of playing golf? And what if a couple of gallons of milk a day derive from my activity of hand-milking a cow? Does that make it in any way less 'efficient' than if I spent the time playing golf? When economists try to measure things like that they quickly get themselves in to very deep water.
So more and more people, in all the highly industrial societies, are trying partially to opt out of the big-industry set-up and become less specialized and more self-sufficient. These people are not anachronistic, or ignorant or stupid, but are in fact drawn from the most intelligent and self-aware part of the population. The list of 'intentional communities' in the United States of America is long and getting longer with an increasing momentum. In this country there are several hundred such communities, and the army of 'hippies' and 'drop-outs' wandering about the roads like the pilgrims of old contains many individuals who would like to be self-supporting, but haven't the faintest idea how to set about it.
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