A critique of work

Let us consider, conceptually, ‘work’ and its relation to energy. Obviously, food systems must supply more energy in calories than they absorb in labour: a hunter could not spend more energy chasing an animal than is obtained from eating it. Traditional farming systems necessarily obeyed similar constraints: their calorific input-output ratio was strongly positive (Glaeser and Phillips-Howard, 1987). At the simplest level, this gives us one rationale for a low-work system. But the argument for reducing energy input also goes deeper.

It is true that much of what is wrong with contemporary food systems is the waste and pollution ejected from them (nitrogen runoff; greenhouse gases). However, what is ejected is actually a degraded form of what flows in. To express this in thermodynamic terms (c.f. Dincer, 2002), the inflow represents an ordered and useful form of energy/matter (sometimes called ‘exergy’ or ‘negative entropy’), which is degraded into entropy when it is used up. This connects with the theme of transformation or metamorphosis, an important representation of ‘flow’. Therefore, the solution to many systemic problems could be cutting input.

In today’s mainstream paradigm the input is fossil fuels and chemicals, but even physical work like digging is actually just another form of energy. The transition to carbon simply occurred when the exploitation of physical labour could no longer meet industrial energy demands (c.f. Mouhot, 2010). So I would argue that performing too much work on the soil, even digging or ploughing without fossil fuels, is reflected in entropy. This happens because the free energy of self-organising complexity is lost when we intervene aggressively, mashing up grazing organisms or mycorrhizae and destroying soil structure, and thereby causing water runoff, leaching of nutrients, and greenhouse gas emissions.

The fundamental argument for no-till farming (c.f. Dowding, 2007) is that you operate alongside the soil’s own properties, not against them. Empirically on my allotment-site, most people waste both time and energy digging and ploughing, causing loss of fertility; they then inject further inputs in the form of fertiliser to compensate. In the worst case they use petrol-driven hand-held ploughs and chemicals but, even where labour is manual and fertiliser organic, the same logic applies: the more work you perform, the worse the result. Many people abandon their plots because they do not have the time/energy to do all work they imagine is needed. If we simply realise that we will get better yield with less time/work, this could open a new horizon of small-scale high-productivity farming, leaving people space to maintain a diverse livelihood strategy.

The above is not an exhaustive demonstration of the benefits of no-till, which are manifested particularly with respect to climate (e.g. Wang, et al., 2011; Davin, et al., 2014), an issue we will develop in Chapter 9. The point here is just to stress the ‘less-is-more’ argument.

Of all the modern sustainability approaches, Masanobu Fukuoka’s ‘do-nothing farming’ (Fukuoka, 1978) most strongly highlights the negativity of work. But it is important to emphasise that ‘do-nothing’ does not mean non-action: the reduction of work (physical energy) is coupled to an increase of knowledge. Hunter-gatherers possessed immense funds of knowledge (Goonatilake, 1984, p.4); they ‘did nothing’ to nature but were in effect harvesting knowledge. In farming, while physical work (e.g. ploughing) is negatively related to the free energy of the complex soil system, knowledge is positively related because it strengthens the soil’s self-organising capabilities. It achieves this by, for example, mulching, using such forms of biomimicry as intercropping, or in the case of Fukuoka’s system broadcasting seed-balls containing many varieties of seed and allowing nature to decide which would germinate where.

The implications of this argument are by no means confined to a critique of capitalism; they go right back to the dawn of the so-called agricultural revolution. Wherever centralist/top-down agrarian systems conducted large-scale interventions (irrigation in place of water-conservation, monocropping in place of intercropping, deep ploughing in place of conserving soil structure, plantations in place of sensitivity to micro-characteristics of particular fields), they effectively increased entropy expressed as a deficit of self-organisation.