At my share house (Radish House) I have 17sqm of raised garden beds. It’s an interesting amount, because it’s certainly enough to generate seasonal gluts of certain vegetables providing some to preserve to to share beyond our four person household, and yet it’s not really enough to reliably supply others with, say, a regular veggie box.
These garden beds are valued by my housemates, but I initiated them, and largely direct the management of them because I felt the particular need to be growing food as part of my week-to-week routine, to help balance my life against all the time I spend on a computer. They are, however, already partly collectivised as the entire house makes an effort to eat from them, the house pays collectively for at least some of the seedlings and other inputs, and both housemates and other people in my life often come and help work in them.
In this article, I explore what it looks like to continue down that collectivisation journey, with a focus on where local food production fits into home economies (not necessarily monetary ones).
The Collective Homestead Approach
There’s an obvious approach to collectivising food production in a share house. If, as a household, we value some food self-sufficiency then the collective unit could obviously be the household (everyone who lives on this site). We might call this a “homestead” approach, a household that values food production and considers it to be part of the practice of shared living together is the sort of think we see featured both in back-to-the-land rural homesteads, and amongst suburban Permaculture enthusiasts. If we look at the Retrosuburbia Case Studies, for example there are many examples of this. In most cases the people engaged in that collective practice are doing so in somewhat conventional household structures (like a nuclear family) tied to fairly conventional property ownership, although there is one share-house case study.
If the unit of collectivisation is the household, that doesn’t necessarily mean we need a household of gardeners. We just need a household that values food growing alongside other home labour. Perhaps such a household distributes labour according to interest, ability, rotation or some other means - and so gardening falls only to some people while others in the house focus more on cooking, washing, home maintenance or other home economic activities.
The Homestead vs Multi-House Collectivism
So Radish House, where I live, is a rental share house of people involved in trying to build a multi-house collective together using the RAD Housing approach. That doesn’t mean gardening couldn’t or shouldn’t be collectivised at the household level, after all that’s the level we currently collectivise food shopping in our house, and gardening seems very closely related.
The idea is Radish House might eventually be one house in a larger collective that has collective financial ownership of multiple properties, as well as some collective decision making practices, values, processes and other agreements. Some decisions, for example might occur amongst people living together in the house, whereas some decisions might be for the whole collective (and we haven’t yet decided which ones).
All this is to say that multi-house collectivism introduces a new possibility, that gardening is collectivised at the scale of the multi-house collective. There are both upsides and downsides to this. Unlike co-housing or eco-village developments, where there might literally be one big garden for a community (because it’s all on one site), our vision is one of multiple houses spread across several suburbs. That means being collectively responsible for the daily watering of a garden that is half an hour bike ride away would be quite a pain in the butt. Location does matter for gardening tasks, especially for regular time-sensitive ones. There’s a reason why Permaculture suggests zones of activity to ensure that the most regular gardening happens very close to where you live.
On the flip side, a collective of fifty people spread across half a dozen share-houses could be much more organised with regard to some of the bigger gardening tasks, and could justify owning better equipment. Such a group might collectively organise larger batches of hot compost, or raise seedlings in one house to supply all the others. It might even be possible to better match the food produced with the food eaten, as the houses with the largest garden areas might not be the ones with the most mouths to feed.
Overall I’d say that there are obvious benefits to this approach over the single homestead approach, despite maybe a few slightly sensitive areas to navigate, such as giving people a bit of autonomy to “grow their own weeds” sometimes. These sensitive areas around balancing collective efficiency with individual autonomy exist in all collective projects, and would need to be navigated in a multi-house collective anyway.
Specialisation vs Inclusion
Regardless of the difference in scale between the two examples above, there exists that question of whether everyone participates in food growing a bit, or whether there are some people who have much more knowledge of this area, and/or dedicated much more time to the labour of it. I suspect that as the group of people in the collective grows (such as in the multi-house example), it’s even less likely that everyone will be equally interested in this area of work.
This seems like a totally reasonable approach to me. One idea that interests me personally is the notion of “Half Farmer, Half X”, which was named by half-farmer/half-writer Naoki Shiomi. I’m unlikely to want to go into agriculture full time, especially in a world which finds it very hard to provide an ample and reliable livelihood for small-scale regenerative farmers. But spending a couple of days a week on food production, in balance perhaps with work the stimulates my brain more (such as writing software) feels like a life-path with many advantages. This is also compatible with Holmgren’s arguments in Retrosuburbia that a future of ecological and economic shocks is inevitable as we navigate the climate crisis and the death-throes of neoliberal capitalism, and that a rise in home-based and more varied livelihoods is likely.
Given that, it seems likely that some people want to get in on that trend early and I think it’s important in that context to consider that when someone labours to grow food (the half farmer part), that’s part of their livelihood work. If your brain is stuck firmly in the market economy, then you might consider this to mean that people deserve to get paid for their urban farming work. Even if we want to consider livelihoods in a more general non monetary way, growing food sustainable and locally is certainly a valuable contribution to society and also everyone deserves to have their basic needs met (in my commie view, regardless of whether they are making valuable contributions to society). We certainly don’t want folks to be unable to afford food, housing or entertainment because they are spending half their time growing amazing tomatoes instead of working as a marketing executive.
All this is to say, some people might really dive into food production, and if we don’t pay them for it then we need to find some other way to ensure their needs are met.
Collectivised Food Production as a Worker Cooperative
If we’ve got a small group of people performing specialised labour as part of their livelihood to produce food for a larger group of people (say the fifty people in this theoretical multi-house collective), then one could say that we’re essentially talking about a business. Even if we’re saying we want this to happen without some capitalist owning the means of production, and we want people to half the self-agency needed for dignified collective labour, we might still be talking about a cooperative business.
Let’s imagine then that in our vision of fifty person housing collective, there are five people practising a “half farmer, half X” lifestyle who form a worker cooperative. This cooperative business essentially leases the garden area in the yards of housing collective houses, and then sells the vegetables back to the housing collective occupants.
Let’s even imagine that this actually works out financially, and that there is enough income from this to pay a modest salary to our half-farmers. Do we want this?
My answer is a big maybe. I’m a supporter of worker cooperatives, such as our friends at Earthworker. I want to see small, local initiatives win over big agribusiness and the supermarket duopoly. I think there’s a lot to be said about village scale economies made up of small businesses. Also, while I want to see a transition to non-financial exchanges for many things, I admit that it’s not clear that sustainable farming workers, already under-pressure and under-values should be the first to sacrifice the benefits having money currently brings in order to usher in a brave new collective future. Maybe the computer programmers should go first.
Having said all that, one trick that capitalism pulled on us was to financialise more and more of our lives. Replacing interactions which used to be relational with mediation by the market so that profit could be extracted. Mutual aid between friends and neighbours being replaced by precarious gig economy work on platforms like fiver, and yet more services sold to us to numb us further to increasingly isolated and individualistic lives. And yes, this is complicated by the fact that many of those previously non-financial services were performed by women in patriarchal households and the financialisation of them often represented freedom, autonomy, recognition and greater equality.
So maybe, in a transitional phase, I’m willing to pay my housemate for veggies out of my backyard. Maybe there are ways to better demonstrate that it’s transitional, and build better pathways and clearer visions for a post-capitalist solidarity economy that lies beyond.
However, we got a bit carried away mulling over that hypothetical, and it’s time to come crashing back to earth now because it seems likely to me that the business we described above can’t actually support the even the modest livelihoods we imagined. Food just costs too little, because it’s often grown at massive scale, in extractive ways, and shipped globally in patterns powered by imperial extraction.
Not just that, suburban land costs too much. My 17sqm of garden beds is sitting on land worth approximately $2,000 per square meter, and so even excluding paths, compost beds, sheds and all the rest, we’re talking about a $34,000 asset being leased to this coop. Not to say that our permaculture-loving household necessarily expects a return on this, and there are a few businesses around that garden in other people’s yards at a $0 lease because the residents don’t want to look after the yard but enjoy the plants being there. Still, there’s a reason why commercial farms don’t go buying up suburban lots and turning them into market gardens, it just isn’t cost-effective on a purely commerical basis.
Supporting Transitional Livelihoods as Part of a Larger Vision for the Future
So the problem with treating this problem as a business is that even though growing food in every yard in suburbia makes sense for society, it doesn’t make financial sense right now. And the problem with treating this problem as an important utility for the housing collective is that while this may work for a commune where everyone works some job for the community, our group has only at present collectivised housing ownership and some non-financial home labour, not people’s day jobs - and why should food production go first if the programmers aren’t willing to do the same? There’s also an additional problem that turning the housing collective into an “everything collective” (or commune) tends to pull it out of society rather than help weave the local postcapitalist economy that we want.
There are some partial solutions lying around though. Maybe there are enough parts here to cobble something together:
💡 Partial self-sufficiency
People working in a collectivised food growing project would probably, for starters, be paid in food. While working two days a week for free vegetables still doesn’t make economic sense in the eyes of some members of the financial economy, it’s probably not less work than growing the same food for yourself alone, as there are benefits to increase scale, space and equipment.
💡 Community currencies
While urban food growing may not make sense in the current economy, it’s often acceptabe trade in community currencies systems, like LETS, timebanks or other local currencies. A food growing collective that earns some local currency could distribute some of it to it’s members who can this exchange it from some other goods/services.
💡 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
CSA programs are generally connections between consumers (either individually or as a food coop) and farmers where, in the least, the farmer is guaranteed a sale - and likely farmer also receives help with cash flow or risk management by being paid at planting time despite consumers waiting for the harvest. Although the economic value of suburban grown food may not be seen as a huge, a buyers coop could provide somewhat more favorable conditions than the market.
💡 Resilience value recognition
One reason why some of us value suburban food growing is that it provides one possible way to smooth out potential supply-chain disruptions that could easily occur as climate effects worsen. Perhaps built on top on an ongoing CSA arrangement above, consumers (either singly or cooperatively) could decide that the resilience value of the ongoing local food production is worth an ongoing contribution that is greater than the current financial value of the food. This is arguably a form of “green consumerism”, but of combined with an agreement around future access to the food could also be motivating to more self-interested doomers.
💡 Mutual aid networks / gift economies
Rather than building on financial transactions, it’s possible that collectivised food production would be at a good scale to destribute through a local mutual aid network that also encourages non monetary flows of value in other areas. Regardless of the fact that there is not transactional value attached to the food grown, a thriving local network might provide for other life needs of people involved thus fullfilling the requirement of livilihoods (for which money is only an intermediary to having those needs fullfilled).
Unconclusion
This article is a snapshot of some of the ideas floating round in my head, not a clear argument driving towards a single conclusion. There’s room in my life for continued experimentation in this space, as I’m interested in gardening anyway, and the Brassica Collective has expressed a strong desire to firmly incorporate food growing. If this sparks ideas for you, I’d love to chat further about it.