Subsistence Farming and The Value of Living Crisis

by Walking With Goats | Oct 3, 2022

From time to time – perhaps more frequently now – people ask if I have surplus produce to sell, and I never know quite how to answer them. Both parts of the question are stumbling blocks for me: the idea of surplus and the money for which I’d sell.

Today, it’s almost the end of September, and Fran and I will be canning carrots. This month has seen two terrible losses for me. I don’t know how much I’ll speak about them now.

What’s a carrot worth, I wonder?

Or a life?

What is the value of an egg, now, as the chickens go off lay and we wait in hope for one or two each day, which we might get to before the rats? My chickens are Ixworths. Last year I paid £45 for half a dozen, fertilised by a different cockerel to strengthen my genetic line. I managed to raise two. They still live.

The Pooper Trooper is dead though.

What’s an egg worth, nurtured, hatched and stroked under a heat lamp, whispered to at nights and fed with lemon balm?

What is it worth to the hens who lay them in the screaming, blanket-lit barns? Our hens know when theirs are taken.

The carrots are beautiful, emerging from the steam of the pressure canner brighter than they did from the soil. However many we had, we would can them.

I carry them with fearful care out to the barn.

“Reality privilege” is an exciting new term I’ve been hearing bandied around a lot recently, and soon it sounds like more and more of us will be able to recognise what it means – privilege only really being visible from the outside.

They’ve stuck the word ‘reality’ on to the front of it for a reason as well. You’ve got to be able to tell the difference these days. When Philip Schofield is spinning a glitter-sprayed wheel of misfortune to diagnose extreme poverty from live callers-in to breakfast television, it’s important to stick the word ‘reality’ in anywhere you can.

Unreality privilege, on the other hand, is not a term I’ve heard at all. This is because soon we’re all going to live inside it. And once everyone is privileged, of course, then no one will be. The metaverse is going to be amazing: full of Dubai-like informationscapes exploding with data fireworks and code-based headlight rivers in purple and green. Down at the bottom, round the dark, hidden feet of all those panoramas, there’ll be absolutely no boring slums.

This episode of Walking With Goats sets foot into unfamiliar territory; an urban grid where no goat ever lives outside a zoo. Before us is a Smart City. I wish I could call it an in-and-out mission.

I used to quite like urban living. I was really into brunches, even if the conspicuous consumption and disparity of cities left a bad taste, it wasn’t one that a Bloody Mary couldn’t drown. I used to like not being covered in animal shit, in retrospect.

Now’s a good time of year to be in the countryside though.

Peace comes.

In the dreamy summer’s ending, there’s a mist that makes inroads to the sunlit mornings – the first rain in months now been and gone – and, tantalising, crystalising here and there in the treelines and hedgerows, there are sudden lustful reds. Rosehip and elder and blackberry. More this year than I’ve ever seen. I’ve always been snagged by superstition and so find it hard to avoid premonition in such abundance. Either way they mark a change that can’t be ignored.

The goats won’t stay in the fields now. They know what’s good for them. Or they believe they do.

Our efforts to stake claims on the glut leave me scratched and stung, Kama injured, and the four young bucks disdainful of all boundaries. I am living with the weight of their lives. Autumn is harvest time and this winter I cannot feed and house them all.

Now is a time when it wouldn’t be hard to find faith.

As sense-making becomes harder in perfectly inverse proportion to the number of fact-checking websites we find ourselves referencing, I’ve noticed instead that meaning-making is really becoming a thing. It’s like the new raving round here. No one’s got time for pills and techno anymore. People are looking for the things in which they can place belief.

The cost of living crisis comes, holding the hand of a silent sister.

I’ve had some minutes before the first animal round of the morning to read this month, the babies no longer so young that I’m scared they’ll be dead if I don’t get there immediately after waking. I’ve focused mainly on technocrat thinktank policies, a philosophy of appetite, social science papers about transhumanism and a big fat dose of Thomas Paine. (Having my phone nicked while on holiday was in all likelihood the best thing that could ever have happened to me.)

Our lightbulbs keep blowing, so I’ve been reading by candlelight. We’re going to try making candles soon.

This was a great quote from Thomas Paine (although there are loads of them):

“…could we take off the dark covering of antiquity and trace them [kings] to their first rise, we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang; whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtilty obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.”

At the beginning of September, the Pooper Trooper was still in his box at nights, though in the scullery, surrounded by the chaos of food preservation and manufacturing equipment that we’ve amassed over the last three years. It is – I have to confirm for myself – almost three years since 2020’s changes landed in our lives. And we are living tightly too, packed on top of each other in a house that used to seem big, consolidating our efforts in spite of our constant conflicts.

Chatting with friends about 2020 over dinner a week or so ago, I recalled aloud how a percentage of us spent the year coming to understand that everyone else would be fine with us being exiled from society and taken to camps for not wanting to take part in an experiment with gene modification.

And people are surprised that I’ve turned my life over to subsistence farming.

I got asked again, “How long are you going to do this for?”

In the scullery, a milk and cream separator is our new prize possession; shiny, red, indistinguishable but for its electric motor from the antique I found in Aberystwyth museum in July. I can only urge you to go to visit this wonderful place, which charts the eclipse of humble gratitude by modern glitz and achievement and triviality in such a way that one cannot help but cry.

Their recreation of a single-room Welsh cottage holds its hearth and bible and its rack of wooden spoons as keepsakes underneath hunched shoulders, the slate and oak of which its pieced together enveloped by the surrounding theatre/cinema that invited global dreams into Aberystwyth over the twentieth century and dressed them in cascades of red and gold brocade.

On our own shelves, around the milk and cream separator, there are many modern replicas – some less beautiful in purpose. There are pots for stock and for cheesemaking, slow cookers for rendering fat, fermentation airlocks and incubators and presses and cleavers. There are chemicals for tanning, which I saw named in apothecary bottles displayed behind glass on our trip to Aberystwyth. Outside the scullery leans the scythe I need to oil and replace in the barn. They had one there on show, that nobody could name for me, fitted with a raking arm which would row as it cut – a job for which our aging neighbours refurbished the rusty Haybob trailer in their barn this year, solely for our little field. Because even such second-generation equipment is now obsolete.

Between the rafters, in the cobwebs and asbestos of our scullery ceiling, there is rat poison secreted above the oat and flour bins. The final Pooper Trooper now lost, just as his brothers and sisters were lost, our war continues with the many varieties of predator parasite.

Here’s another candle-lit quote I came across during one of the bouts of insomnia that still allow me to work on more than subsistence:

“…Let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter… For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.”

Surprising how little is made of Paine in British learning. Bertrand Russell, for instance, doesn’t see fit to grace his takedown of Original Sin, or his dogma-free deism, with a single entry in The History of Western Philosophy. Nor, despite its epoch-shaping impact, did Common Sense make it onto the curriculum for my History GCSE.

The government – it’s commonly understood throughout Britain at least – is here to make our world fairer. Although the retention of facts, and therefore most of history, isn’t one of my strong suits, I feel I was in plentiful company in my previous conception of our state as a democratic one, won through hard evolution from a system of baronies, to finally achieve some measure of constraint over power-hungry despots and orchestrate sympathetic wealth redistribution instead.

The government, in theory – even if no recent example could be found – was reasoning. It was the social manifestation of reason.

It’s a fucking great story, isn’t it.

There’s a rat moving right now in fact, in the scullery.

I’ve been suffering from a bad bout of colour-indigestion this month, where even small quantities of red, gold and black pageantry make it really hard to swallow anything.

There’s just so much news around. You can’t get away from it. And yet nonetheless, brief pavement conversations wash up after only moments on comments such as, “Well, none of us know what the hell’s going on, do we?”

Thankfully such knowledge vacuums can swiftly be filled by comprehending that – whatever the fuck it is that’s going on – it all adds up to needing to wipe out Putin.

There’s just so much news around, and absolutely none of it is about biodigital convergence.

Red, gold, black.

I’ve also been crying a lot. Reality privilege is like that.

One night after Pooper died, I was very tired, in tears, and the animal jobs went on with randomness and hurt and futility, and the sun lit the mountain on the opposite side of the valley – lit the whole of it up with a peculiar yellow radiance against dark clouds – and I thought, that’s what is meant by the mercy of God.

Beauty. Our ability to experience beauty and to know that we are a part of it too.

Once upon a time, such colours – the colours of the natural world – were the brightest to be found anywhere. It was orchestration not accident that positioned the crucifix lightwell symmetrically over the upraised rafters of the tithe barn.

We must have meaning.

The need has been used against us, as a weakness, but I do not believe that’s really what it is.

Americans, from what I can glean – or at least the half that Biden shook his scarlet fists at this month – have a whole other take on government, where the barony thing is still a yoke they’re trying to get out from. This is a point of view which I’d had zero contact with as the child of English, middle-class, socialist hippies. In it, gun control is the incapacitation of the people by their oppressors. And tax is a protection racket run by gangsters and drug dealers. Free markets are a civil liberty. It’s cronyism not capitalism that’s responsible for the tragedy of the commons. And the constitution beats democracy.

Like I said, all this was news to me.

As October’s dawn comes, crimson over the colder mist, and puts me in mind of the illustrated advertisment in Aberystwyth museum – of a many acre factory where the production of iron machines now humbled were once boasted over, where chimneys were counted with pride – outside the house, in the shifting fog, my two rams lose each other. Separated from their ewes – the only form of contraception I have – one is at the haystack, I see, the other standing at my window. Under the red sky, he’s crying for his brother. He cannot rest.

The whole day after we found Pooper slaughtered, I didn’t stop crying. Unable to house him with the forty plus other ducks I have here – their othering of him a brutal onslaught – he died alone, in the house I thought him large enough to call safe haven.

Subsistence farming is hard, but my experience of it is nothing in comparison to what sent the boys from here away to those factories, only a few generations ago.

Eventually, because all our consciousness will be digital and linked together through the web, there won’t be any useless death. The power of the Smart City will be within our very fingertips. No longer upright creatures, reaching out for what we cannot grasp with ease, we will have everything provided to us. We’ll need not even animate a scrolling hand.

In the PDFs on biodigital convergence, underneath the heavy mantle of the VR headsets, everyone’s smiling. The colours must be sensational.

Unreality privilege is like that.

Although we’re all sitting down to dinner together these days – the “vaxxed” and the “unvaxxed” – there remain some differences in our trajectories, our understandings of the world, and in our outlooks. One of these, I’ve noticed, is that those who did decide to take the injections often don’t know the meaning of the words technocracy or transhumanism.

I wondered aloud to Fran if it was worth spending a whole outing delineating for people what the Fourth Industrial Revolution will actually mean, but Fran quite rightly suggested it might be better in a nice infographic:

If you’d like more detail on it, please do click on the links scattered throughout these words. There are many ways down the rabbit hole – swift routes and scenic ones.

And the jaws of 4IR are closing.

One of Twitterspats I took in this week presented a short video.

A documentary on the approaching wave of child poverty shows two boys interviewed on the sofa of a house that isn’t theirs. They list things that they are grateful for – their mother’s love, not to be on the streets – each with their own brightly coloured shock-proof tablet in their hands. And the things that they’ve never done – though they don’t matter, they say, in comparison to love – they list these too, as they stare down into their laps, where they are building pixelated Minecraft homes.

Even Childline suggests that the children who find their website use an app to build their Happy Place.

The overlords of Dickensian disparity would have reveled in such a coup. The screen meets hope and aspiration and imagination, and fill these holes, until they are smoothly forgotten.

Goats are intelligent in many ways but foresight isn’t one of them. All four young bucks have found their lust for the life-giving properties of the hedgerows have landed them, over the course of the last weeks, in situations that they would have been better off avoiding.

Rosehip and elder are health. Rosehip and elder are life. (This is why Elder Negra has peer-reviewed proof of its efficacy against the spike protein – both vax and covid induced.) If I could have, for the goat boys’ own sakes, I might have introduced geo-fencing shock collars, but this is beyond both my emotional capacity and financial means.

Approaching the boundaries of their enclosures, they might have been put off by only discomfort. Perhaps eventually they would have learned to graze the field I offer and not even look up at the treasure trove that lies beyond.

The jaws of 4IR are closing.

What is a life worth?

Social Impact Investing will give us an algorithmically updated valuation. Alongside UBI – which they will soon roll-out as a more-than-funsize version of the conditional cash transfers already trialed on addicts and refugees – Smart Cities will monitor and control our behaviour as they commodify our poverty.

How long until they introduce CBDCs – a system of programmable money, the conditions of which will be subservience to the state? We’ve already been told: five years. Five years to form communities, or even individualities, resilient enough to live a life that we choose for ourselves. And they will not be five years in which sunny Saturdays can be dedicated to courses on composting.

These five years are intended to overwhelm us, to leave us confused and bereft, to polarise and atomise us. As we’re conveyed through their crises to land at the gates of a new global era where the “public-private partnership” rules all, it will be worth taking note of the history that they’ll write for us soon – from our small place inside it.

The jaws are closing: food and fuel.

The progress of our civilisation into the age of technocracy is marked by the divestment of our most basic needs. Oil and gas unaffordable, wood and coal fires will soon be illegal, currency exchange not sanctioned and controlled by the state impossible. People are realising inside their souls, even if they don’t know the words for what’s going on. They want to grow food and learn animal husbandry, but it’s becoming too late.

Smart does not mean clever, as until 2020 – without foresight – I took for granted. Pages of fruitless search engine foraging will eventually disclose some tiny treasures of knowledge. Smart is an acronym, and this is what it means:

Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology.

Unreality privilege will be totally inclusive. We’ll all stand motionless in wonder once we’ve put the collars on.

4IR is a land grab, but it’s more than that. The Green economy will float on a distant stock exchange the power of our field to meet the cold sky and birth mist. Natural Asset Classes and gene patenting are on their way.

In answer to my friend, who was visiting from London – because such things are allowed this year – I think I’ll be doing this self-sufficiency thing for as long as I can.

4IR is not only a war. It is the final act of enclosure. In our Smart Cities, we are assured, we’ll be fed by CRISPR vertical farms, the carbon negative souls of which will be cleansed by the cheap purchase of our countryside. Fran and I have asked ourselves what it means to win in such a situation. Because mere survival isn’t winning. We must have meaning.

Outside, the ram lamb goes on alone, standing by the lucerne bed in the circle of an unfinished fence, croaky and unheard.

I cannot sell what I make, though I would swap it for work – to help me finish that fence for instance. The pain of losses, my powerlessness in the face of predators, makes it impossible for me to allot the produce value.

It took us months, Fran and I, to answer our own question. In a war such as the one we’re fighting, winning means invalidating the game.

Lives become more valuable, not less, in the path of crisis.