(By John F. Robert)

Farming

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• Farming is a key component of the relationship between an environment and its inhabitants

• Farming, more than feeding humankind for sustaining a livelihood, feeds its imaginary of the nurtured alliance between an environment and its inhabitants.

• Farming is a deep invariant; farming would remain a key component of our embodiment even for people moving to Mars. It is a strategic transversal component to cultivate a transition in our relationship to what we used to name world. Farming as connection to food is a daily tutorial for everybody.

• If farming has historically sedentarized humankind, bringing the landlord as archetype of the ownership, it is today declining in a variety of patterns.

  • Modernity has of course brought the industry of monoculture on large fields, with a world market production, with an increased productivity envisioned by automation, with fertilizers, seeds, animal species, produced with loss of sovereignty for the farmer, forcing a fidelity to reduce the investment risk at their expense. Small size farmer can’t compete.

  • Farming has also left the land of countryside.  In a lot of cities, we see urban food taking ground. Vertical farming is also envisioned, and some vertical farms are already in production.

  • Local production, local distribution, short circuit from farm to fork are promoted and proposed as alternatives.

  • Forest garden promoting an alliance of freedom with the environment is also a trend within the permaculture.

  • Tracing from farm to fork has become very important for quality trust.

  • Automation is developed not only for large farms, but local production, up to economic solution for a garden on the terrace of an apartment.

 

Envisioning farming supplying food abundance

• Farming is not first a question of land ownership, but access to resources for farming

• Farming does not need anymore to be a sedentarization process, preventing farmer, up to now, to move even for a holiday week, especially when breeding.

• Farming does not need to be an industrial activity; it can be a function integrated to any human location. For instance, law in some country force housing promotors to supply parking places per unit, EV charger with parking; by analogy, we can imagine farming as a required function in any settlement… Any type of housing should have resources connected to food production. We could explore here other paths than shopping for having access to food.

• Farming could be shaped as activity on voluntary based, in synergy with automation to produce abundance everywhere, a direct connectivity of citizens with food production

• Food sovereignty goes with local production and global production of diversified solutions designed for scale out.

• Farming is a co-operative process with human and non-human actors.

• Acting on farming must be conceived as a seeding activity, where you let providence brings its contribution

• Farming comes always with an economical model, its governance, politics, and beliefs. Farming comes always with an archetype placing human being in their environment. We can’t target unicity here, we must address the coexistence of the inherited diversity, even if we promote one orientation. For instance, laws in India and in Europe concerning farming follow opposite orientations. In Europe, it is the farmer that is protected, even if he rents some of the land before the Landlord. Reverse in India. Landlords have the power.

 

• Farming involved a large bundle of know-how, following the profile of the activity, its automation. To be effective we need to address how the fertility of the techniques for farming, always evolving, connect people, promoting some of them to allow new patterns of alliances. It is important here to be conscious of the ‘problem domain’: the connectivity by farming before farming techniques themselves.

 

• Identifying how involved transactions associate their agent is essential to symbolize the connectivity in any patterns. (cfr. SWIFT)