Bullerby farming is perhaps a naive dream, but industrial agriculture is a nightmare

Let us call the bluff of industrial agriculture!

I guess you have heard about Astrid Lindgren. She wrote children’ books, perhaps most famously Pippi Longstocking, an anarchist girl with superpowers. She didn’t only care for children, she also cared for animals and was at times very active in animal welfare issues. So much that the Swedish law for animal welfare of 1987 was presented at her 80^th birthday and named Lex Lindgren. That law was, at the time, probably the strictest animal welfare law in the world. Among many other rules, it gave breeding cows the right to graze, i.e. it was prohibited to keep them indoors all year round. It also included a phasing out of cages for hens (which took a lot longer than planned to realise, first 2003 were the “traditional” cages banned).

The Bullerby landscape, image Tobias Nilsson

Since Lex Lindgren, dairy farms have increased in size, management systems have changed, e.g. with robot milking, and the bigger dairy farms are now in the plains where most land is arable as opposed to earlier when they were predominantly in mosaic landscapes with pastures, crop lands, lakes, wetlands and forests. There is now an intensive lobby to get rid of the right to graze for dairy cows. It is simply not doable for stables with 2,000 cows the argument goes, and the modern stables are so spacious and well ventilated that it much better for the cows to be indoors, protected from rain, sun, wind, flies and mosquitoes. The fact that pasture is not rich enough to support a milk yield of 14,000-15,000 litres per year is not so often spoken of, and neither is the fact that it is more work to organise grazing. Interestingly, on neither side of the debate there is much talk about grazing as the most basic cow behaviour. It is not only a matter of ingesting a certain amount of feed, or getting exercise. Grazing is much more, it is more or less the essence of being a cow.

Anyway, to the point. Astrid Lindgren is a red flag for proponents of industrial agriculture, in particular animal agriculture. Apart from Pippi, she also wrote several books where the landscape, people and animals of her youth, i.e. in the 1920-30s, were central, e.g. four books about the six Bullerby (“the noisy village”) children. In an article in a leading Swedish newspaper three representatives of industrial agriculture recently referred with scorn to organic farming as Bullerby dreams and claimed that organic was a return to a time when people starved. Obviously, representatives of organic agriculture responded and assured that they were not backward luddites.

A friend of ours, Tobias Nilsson called and discussed with my wife, Ann-Helen, if we should not defend Bullerby farming. Instead of trying to distance us from the farming system 100 years ago, we should point to all its merits – obviously not without also pointing to some weaknesses. Ann-Helen took the lead and the result was published in Aftonbladet with the title (in translation) Industrial farming is a story with no happy ending. The Swedish agriculture system of the 1930s was diverse and virtually every of the 400,000 farms had a cow or five, grew potatoes, kept laying hens and grew most of the feed to their animals and most of the food for the people. There were basically no tractors or combine harvesters, but there were many horse or oxen driven machines as well as thresher and other stationary machines (powered by electricity) in the farmsteads. Chemical fertilisers were in little use and pesticides even less. Grain yields were considerably lower but the total production of milk was actually much higher than today (despite half the population). Butter was exported and some oil seed cakes were imported, mainly to feed dairy cow. Not only were the farms spread out in the country, also dairies, mills, slaughterhouses and other essential infrastructure were. The system was robust and productive and produced sufficient food for the population.

Many children grew up in Bullerby-style conditions, for the better and the worse. Around 40 percent of the work force was in agriculture, slightly more than in the industry. The share of income used for food was obviously a lot higher and people lived shorter, but not because they lacked food. The working conditions were not always so good, neither for the farmers nor the farm labourers.

I believe it is time to call the modernist bluff. It is true that industrial farming produce cheaper agriculture commodities. It is the main thing it is good at. That is at the expense of the environment, health and people. Ultimately, it is also not beneficial for farmers at large and certainly not for the majority of them that have to quit farming; because for every farmer getting bigger, there is one losing her livelihood. On a system’s level the effect of “efficiency” is just lower prices, which causes the farmer to invest more in order to bring costs down, which causes prices to drop and more farmer to quite, and so the treadmill goes on and on and on.

for every farmer getting bigger, there is one losing her livelihood.

Industrial farming will not generate any children’s stories, it will only generate ugliness, destroyed environments and a continued emptying of the farmed landscape.

They know it, which is why they have to portray Bullerby farming or any equal simpler, small scale farming system as being inefficient and people being worked to death. This is why they portray organic farming as leading to starvation. But small scale agriculture is no less productive per area unit than bigger scale. It is obviously a lot less productive per man hour; the whole project of industrialisation of agriculture is to lower labour cost per unit produced and not the produce more per se. Organic agriculture is indeed less productive per area unit than conventional agriculture, but it is less dependent on external inputs and it is much more robust.

Small scale organic farms can produce food instead of commodities. It allows more people to be engaged in food production. That is the real dividing line. It is a nice story as opposed to the nightmare of industrial agriculture.