Low-Input Agriculture

Description

R.C. Smith:

"As an alternative, Robert Biel argues in The Entropy of Capitalism (2012) toward low-input accumulation regimes for food production. This low-input system, formulated in opposition to capitalism’s high-input system, recommends the transition to the use of small and medium-sized farms as well as personal and communal gardens, which he contends are “[s]urprisingly …/ more efficient than plantation agriculture”.[11] Robert King summarises Biel’s research, noting that he: “also cites the aquaponic greenhouse system technologies as another example of his proposed low-input accumulation regimes. Where the system of capital requires the high-input regimes just to reproduce itself, low-input regimes require a different set of structural supports premised on the logic of a different political economy, supports such as community-based food production divorced from all the trappings of agribusiness. The virtue of Biel’s proposal lies in the fact that low-input agriculture would provide a systemic alternative.

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Sustainable low-input agriculture, which is typically achieved in diverse, tightly integrated agro-ecological systems, already provides a significant amount of the world’s food and through many different organisational forms.[18] Colin Tudge and Graham Harvey write, for instance, that:

- Diverse, organic or low-input farms when well managed can be among the most productive of all, per unit area of land … Already such farms, in traditional form, worldwide, provide 50% of the world’s food – even though they have been sadly sidelined by the powers-that-be: treated as an anachronism. The industrial agriculture that soaks up most of the investment and research supplies only 30%.

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One of the strengths of Biel’s low-input vision is that it remains open to the use of modern technologies and to a technological future. From the perspective of political theory, Biel’s position also seems to remain open to potentially small and large-scale organisational initiatives insofar that one can imagine local, regional or ‘non-state like state’ networks being developed, similar to what we read in certain strands of ecological economics.[25] It is not, in other words, a closed or isolated philosophy of agriculture limited to rigid designations of rural vs. urban (one problem I see with agrarianism, for example).” (http://www.heathwoodpress.com/exploring-transition-alternative-agricultural-systems-commons-labour-emancipatory-requirements/)