Gabriel: Welcome to the Polyculture Podcast,
Lena: The podcast where we talk about all kinds of culture from permaculture to pop.
Gabriel: And today we are talking about monoculture. So as always, the episode is going to be in two parts. The first part we’re going to break down some more theoretical academic stuff. We’re going to talk about Eco-Marxism and fertilizer and things like that. And then in the second half, after the musical interlude, we’re going to play some video games and talk about how agriculture and food and environments are constructed in these games.
Lena: Gabe do you want to talk about monoculture and [00:01:00] agriculture and how you’ve come to think about all that.
Gabriel: Yeah. Lena and I have both done some farming ourselves. We met at the green market in New York City. Before that I had done a month of like farm study in Japan. I had worked in a berry farm in Northfield, Minnesota gardened with my mom, all my childhood, and then worked at a farm in upstate New York. And so agriculture and growing things has been. Uh, part of my whole life, as well as yours.
Lena: Yeah. I was a third generation gardener at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the children’s garden program. And alongside this kind of communal gardening experience, I also had a community garden plot with my dad in Brooklyn, which then of course got bulldozed and turned into luxury condos, like so many good things in New York city. But that was kind of where I got my start as a, as a grower of food in places where it [00:02:00] might not necessarily be what urban planners had in mind for that space eventually. Started managing farmer’s markets, which is how we met as, as Gabe mentioned. And through that work, I got really curious about regional food ecosystems and how urban and rural economies, and also landscapes can interact and support each other, even though a lot of us in the city can’t, or won’t know where our food comes from and a lot of folks who are growing food have little connection to the folks who buy their food. I ended up farming as a result of that curiosity.
Gabriel: So we both care a lot about agriculture and about food. And yeah, for me, growing up in the Midwest, being surrounded by corn and soy monocultures and then in contrast having our own little garden where my parents and my brother and I were growing food to sustain ourselves really through the year, I [00:03:00] became interested in the different ways we can grow food and how food and agriculture is an interesting mediator between humans and the world we live in.
And so. When we talk about monoculture specifically in today’s episode, we’re going to start in the mid 1800s and go through today. But the unifying thing is financially and capitall, intensive agriculture and growing. Normally one thing at a time. So monoculture is the growing of one thing, mono, meaning one.
So whether that’s wheat, corn, soy, clover, turnips. This is exciting for me because it’s also what I’m doing my research on for my masters. I’m focusing specifically on fertilizer and nutrient depletion cycling. There are a lot of different aspects to monoculture, but specifically for this, we’re going to talk about plants.
Just to connect this episode to the larger project of the Polyculture [00:04:00] Podcast. I want to talk about the word agriculture, because the running theme we have is that everything is culture, natureculture, queer culture. Now we have monoculture. And so “agri,” the first part of that word is a proto Indo European root that means field and is derived further from “ag” hich is another rooe that means to drive, to draw out or forth or to move. So there’s this idea of like an open space that things are coming from an emanating from. And then the second part culture comes from the Latin “cultura,” which means to tend guard till and cultivate.
So we think about culture in a lot of different ways.
Lena: I’m thinking about like yogurt cultures. And like live active cultures
Gabriel: as well as like club culture and all these different things. It’s abstracted in all these different ways.
Lena: Subcultures
Gabriel: Yeah, subcultures. [00:05:00] But, but at the root of this word even is this like farm-plant rearing idea of like cultivating something, of tilling the ground.
Lena: And I think also in many of the uses of the word culture, that idea is still present. Like, even if we’re talking about cultural production or cultural organizing, that stuff serves to kind of tend and till as in like bring up and encourage forward movements or, you know, practices or traditions in addition to the tending and cultivating there’s this implication that there’s a continuation of whatever’s happening, which I think is kind of funny to put in context of monoculture, which as we’ll talk about is just not cyclical in the way that natural processes are supposed to be.
Gabriel: Yeah. Like culture is it’s even cyclical in the word. When you think of a culture, it’s both the act of cultivating something, but it’s [00:06:00] also like culture is what you tend to and what you grow, both the growing, but the growing creates something that is being grown.
Lena: Yeah, makes a lot of sense that, that one of the words we use to talk about growing our food, which sustains us and the generations before and after us is a fractal
Gabriel: A linguistic fractal!
Lena: And also linguistic fractals as, as indicators of kind of cultural fractals, like each, uh, generation of cultivators, if farming in any sort of sustainable way, is tending land to feed a generation that will then tend the same land to feed the next generation.
Gabriel: And to your point about monoculture being a disruption of this cycle, that’s exactly what I’m interested in talking about with this guy whose name is Justus von Liebig who is a 19th century German chemist known for a lot of different things. The most [00:07:00] fun thing, he’s kind of like the guy who invented bullion. So he’s the founder of the stock cube as well as many other things, he’s considered the founder of organic chemistry and—
Lena: That’s a big deal.
Gabriel: He’s a big, he’s a big guy. I don’t know how tall or large he was but he definitely had a conceptually big, big conceptual footprint.
So yeah. Founder of organic chemistry. Did a lot of stuff with plant science. And that’s kind of, what he’s most known for in agriculture is that he was one of the key people that isolated plant nutrients. So just like humans need proteins and carbohydrates and fats to live plants also need specific things plants need specific nutrients. The big ones are nitrogen phosphorus and potassium. But they also need a lot of other little small things like boron
Lena: don’t forget about boron! [00:08:00]
Gabriel: but he was the person who figured out that that was how plants fed themselves. I bring him up because he comes back again and again, when people talk about like how farming should happen, they always call back to him.
And so his character kind of takes on these different things. The other agroecological thing is that he came up with the idea of the law of the minimum, which says that whatever nutrient, the plant needs, that is least available, that is the one that’s going to limit growth. So one of the ways that Liebig comes up in the literature is in the conversation of ecomarxism.
So Karl Marx, founder of Marxism read Liebig stuff, they were kind of contemporaries. And so he was reading Liebig’s chemical treatises, and applying that to his idea of [00:09:00] socialism versus capitalism. In addition to being a chemist Liebig was also traveling around and looking at different agricultural systems and applying what he knew about plant nutrition, to the way that things were being run.
And specifically he took issue with British High Farming, which was this sort of newfangled way of doing things where instead of leaving patures fallow for several years after growing a crop, they would rotate continuously from wheat to turnips, to barley, and then to clover, that was this first instance of continuous cropping of one single thing.
Lena: Why did that change happen?
Gabriel: It’s a lot of interrelated factors. So one of the big things was that the famine happened in Ireland. And so there was this big imbalance in crop prices. And so [00:10:00] these Corn Laws, which were established in the UK were abolished. The Corn Laws created a stable price for grain, but because grain was so desperately needed, they abolish these laws, which really dropped the price of grain and opened up more international competition.
And therefore upped to the amount and the intensity, which farmers had to be growing grain in order to make a living.
Lena: Wow. Oh, that is a really striking example of how market forces directly drive monoculture and kind of create the impetus to squeeze all the life out of your land. In the interest of making a living based on selling your product as opposed to
Gabriel: Yeah, the other big thing that is a fairly inherent connection to Marxism is the idea of making land private of fencing off closing your field because previously when folks would grow a crop on a land for [00:11:00] one or two years, and then leave it fallow, that land would be open for other farmers’ animals to graze on or things like that.
Lena: That’s so nice and makes so much sense.
Gabriel: Yeah, because then the animals would come and they would poop on the ground. And the poop has lots of nutrients that would go into the ground and restore fertility. But in this new system where you had continuous cultivation, you were always growing something on your land. You didn’t have those fallow years. It made more sense to close off your land because you don’t want someone else’s cows coming in, eating the turnips you planted.
Lena: Once you’re growing something and opening your field as a way of sharing, supposedly private resources with the commons beyond that, unless you’re just finding your own, there’s some implication that there’s ownership and property. It seems to me that once this idea of property and ownership was established, that was a big driver into the solidification of a [00:12:00] binary gendered set of tasks and responsibilities. Once we introduced the idea that you could own land, then it’s like, okay, well, you might as well own the people who are your wives and who are bearing your children and tending to your land.
Gabriel: John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, these ecomarxist thinkers are looking at how Liebig was read by Marx and how their ideas kind of interacted and that connection that you’re saying that like, if we’re, if we’re privatizing and exploiting the land then we might as well explain the people. And so, because this system of British high farming needed more nutrient inputs then the land could supply in any given year, Britain had to go elsewhere to find different sources of nutrients.
And so I have an excerpt I’m going to read:
“Great Britain, Liebig declared, robs all countries of the conditions of their fertility. She has already ransacked the battlefields of Leipzig, Waterloo and the Crimea for bones and consumed the [00:13:00] accumulated skeletons of many generations in the Sicilian catacombs. We may say to the world that she hangs like a vampire on the neck of Europe and seeks out its heart’s blood without any necessity and without permanent benefit to her.”
Lena: That is so intense.
Gabriel: It’s so intense.
Lena: And so like so accurate.
Gabriel: Yeah. Right. And so this is even, you know, like pre-colonial projects, Britain is going and raiding catacombs and battlefields for bones because bones contain high amounts of phosphorus that when you grind it up to your field.
Lena: Instead of just thinking about how to not deplete their own nutrients. I feel like that is very characteristic of the colonial mindset. Like instead of shifting systems in a place to make them more self-sustaining, instead we’re going to outsource. And capitalism too, like, “oh, we don’t have this here. We can get it cheaper somewhere else.” Or, you know, it exists somewhere else. “We’re going to go extract it and bring it back to where the demand is.”
[00:14:00]
Gabriel: Yeah. And so this is what Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark point out as the Metabolic Rift. So there’s this metabolism of the earth. Like the cycle of nitrogen is deposited by rain. It’s fixed by clover and other legumes, by decomposing animal feces. There are certain ways that nutrients are introduced into the soil and held in the soil. And then plants take it out and grow, and then they go back into the soil. And so there’s this kind of metabolism, this ecosystem cycling and this new intensive agriculture disrupts that, and it creates this rift. And because there’s this gap then you have to take from somewhere else to fix your own gap, which creates a gap elsewhere.
Lena: Which feels relevant to the idea that the fractal is no longer present and that culture is no longer about cycling
Gabriel: And it’s instead, it kind of creates a positive feedback loop where, because you [00:15:00] took, you have to take more and take more.
So there’s another quote:
“Marx argued that ‘all progress and increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long lasted sources of that fertility.’”
So Marx is reading Liebig, condemnation of high farming and saying, “oh, this, this is exactly what I’m seeing with labor,” basically,
Lena: Right. Just completely depleting a resource, whether it’s nutrients or human capacity and expecting to be able to outsource that need elsewhere.
Gabriel: So to further connect this with the labor part, after rating the bones, the battlefields and the catacombs of Europe, some European “explorers,” as they’re often called,
Lena: Yikes!
Gabriel: go over to Central and South America, and they find guano islands off the coast of Peru, [00:16:00] which are islands birds have been shitting on for decades and decades and their guano, their poop, has built up on these rocks over centuries. And because it’s faeces, it’s, it’s very high in nitrogen.
Lena: Wow.
Gabriel: And so folks start mining this literally like contract labor from China, essentially kind of slave labor to mine this guano off of the rocks. And a similar thing is done with nitrogen deposits in Chile, from ancient microorganisms.
And so I have another quote. This is Bellamy Foster and some Marx in there.
“The bodily metabolism of these workers,”
the workers at the nitrate mines
“was thus being sacrificed to obtain the guano to compensate for the impaired soil metabolism on the English fields. The suicide rate of the Chinese bonded workers digging the guano was so [00:17:00] high that, as a US consult to Peru noted in 1870, ‘Guards had to be placed around the shores of the guano islands, where they are employed to prevent the workers from committing suicide by drowning, to which end the worker rushes in his moment of despair.’”
Lena: Holy shit. So all this shit is happening to kind of like heal this rift that’s been created and of course, creating conditions in which workers want to commit suicide instead of keep working is not healing anything.
Gabriel The system at this point in the late 1800s has been exported all over Europe and all over the United States as well. And so the demand for these sources of fertilizer is super, super high. And so there’s this colonial aspect. There’s this slavery aspect. So Marx and Liebig are both looking around and saying, “It’s unsustainable. This is a rift in our, in our world.”
Lena: The simple fact that the British were [00:18:00] making the choice to value the ability of their fields to produce copious crop over the value of the lives of who knows how many human beings. Not to say humans are more valuable than all other species, but to say “we British folk are okay with sacrificing all of these people whose lives we do not recognize as valuable in order to produce a crop that’s going to make us rich.”
Gabriel: And that’s at the crux of British high farming is, you know, there’s the privatization system, there’s the new kind of intensive crop rotation that’s happening, but it’s all to service the greater investment that was being put in agriculture. Landlords were investing more, putting more capital into land in order to get more capital out through higher value crops like meat instead of food.
Lena: I liked that you just called meat not food,[00:19:00]
Gabriel: By which I mean that folks were growing grain to feed to animals instead of growing food to humans.
Lena: Yeah. That makes, yes that totally makes sense.
This actually feels kind of related to something that’s come up in previous episodes, the kind of moment and strategy of breaking relationship with land in order to create conditions that allow for exploitation of people, as well as, you know, resources and plants. I’m thinking about how the British high farmers only had a relationship with their land as far as their land could serve them to gain capital. Which meant that they probably didn’t feel bad about exploiting that land. And as a result, all of the people who are needed to, you know, mine the guano and such
Gabriel: Another small quote, this is from later the 1930s, the dust bowl. This was a drought in the [00:20:00] 1930s that because of intensive agriculture practices in the United States ended up being absolutely disastrous. And it was called the dust bowl because everything was so arid and there were no crops or plants holding the soil down that all the top soil. Just blew away in these huge clouds of dust. And so Donald Worster has written a really good book on this. This is from the introduction:
“The dust bowl took only 50 years to accomplish. It cannot be blamed on a literacy or overpopulation or social disorder it came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to. Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed country with a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere. When the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of busting and breaking the land and that is exactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are nature’s work, [00:21:00] others are the slowly accumulating efforts of ignorance or poverty. The dust bowl in contrast with the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately and self-consciously set itself to the task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.”
So this is a hundred years later, essentially. And we’re now in a system that the long-term value of the land isn’t and part of the equation.
Lena: Which I feel like is connected to the whole root of both American culture and economic thought, which is that there will always be somewhere else or something else to exploit and extract.
Gabriel: American settlers had inherited this idea of profiting from the land versus sustaining the land.
Lena: Thinking of land as something to be used instead of something to be cared for. I mean, back to our first episodes conversation, thinking about humans as separate from nature.
Gabriel: To close things out, I have this excerpt that I want us to read [00:22:00] together. This is from a farm magazine called the Rural New Yorker in 1950. This is a piece by a guy named Herman, A Bennick who is Dutch, he’s from Holland. He is I writing into the Rural New Yorker, this New York based farm magazine about farming in Europe, basically. And so he brings Liebig, these ideas of, of fertilization and of sustainability, and of changing attitudes to the land back in different ways and then kind of comes to his own conclusion.
“From time immemorial, the farmers of our sandy region had been unable to tell more land than the manure supply of their farm animals could cover. It was an eternal cycle of feeding the cows, horses and pigs with all the products on the farm, seemingly with no other aim or ultimate result than to create sufficient manure again, to grow the crops of next year, with which to make manure again for the following season.
One night a visiting teacher gave a lecture. And when the father came [00:23:00] home, he told us glowing stories of a very learned man in Germany Justus von Liebig who could make manure his in his own laboratory, the very materials which cows made from feed. Only with this difference: that this artificial manure was dry matter and could be bought in bags, as much as anyone could want.
The time came when father no longer sent me with a rake to the pine forest, a new course had commenced, to the station to haul fertilizer. For the first time, since the creation of our planet, the tillers of Holland’s soil, dared to tackle more acreage than their cows could cover with manure.
Today the whip is laid over us all that we have relied too much on chemical fertilizers in this generation, thereby badly neglecting the biological maintenance of the soil. In fact, we are told that we have just ruined the soil on which we live by glorifying the fertilizers too much and by neglecting to feed and sustain that wonderful and little known world of microorganisms. Some spearheads of the biological camp see nothing but gloom ahead and predict [00:24:00] that all of Europe will turn into one vast desert, unless we retrace our steps and abandoned some of our modern tactics. As the one and only road for our salvation, we are told to increase the supply of humans and a bacterial life in our soil, again, by the application of green manure, stable manure, and the compost refuse of cities.
If anyone asked me, but so far, no one has, I cannot see the chemical fertilizing elements as poison. When the wise Creator deposited huge layers of potash in Germany, phosphate in North Africa, nitrate in Chile and nitrogen in our air, we can accept that this was done with a purpose and to the blessing of mankind in the end of the last century. Justus von Liebig apparently found that purpose. I think the best is yet to come in the production power of Mother Earth’s upperhide, our good and life making soil.”
Lena: Oh my god that’s now where I thought this is was going. I was like, “all right, this dude understands [00:25:00] that using fertilizer doesn’t actually work in the long term.” And then we were talking about the wise creator. Like Liebig seemed like he, he really understood how short-sighted the extraction and movement of fertilizers and nutrients was going to be whereas this guy’s like “God gave us this stuff so that we could take advantage of it,” which is so Colonization 101.
Gabriel: I find it especially interesting to contrast this with the Bellamy Foster, because Liebig is, for some reason, able to play both roles. He’s both the critic of intensive farming and he is the father of chemical agriculture.
Lena: I do think that that speaks directly to the process of culture, because this one idea does not just exist in the vacuum of his having written about it, but rather is re-imagined and analyzed within the context of whoever is [00:26:00] absorbing that information. So Bellamy Foster connecting that idea with Marx is one kind of culturing of that idea, this guy in the Rural New Yorker is taking it in a different direction.
Gabriel: We’ve had 71 years of intensification and more further discussion about this kind of stuff. And the last thing I want to bring up here is the idea of climate and of global circulation. I want to draw attention to the invention in 1910 of the Haber-Bosch process, which was instead of mining nitrogen for fertilizer, Fritz Haber who was another German chemist, was able to use intense heat and pressure to synthesize nitrogen from our atmosphere into ammonia, which can be used as fertilizer. So nitrogen is the most abundant element in our atmosphere, but that nitrogen in the atmosphere is not able to be used by [00:27:00] plants as fertilizer because it’s bonded so tightly to itself. The Haber-Bosch process breaks those bonds and then can be used by plants. And so, because it’s such an energy intensive process, it often involves the use of fossil fuels. The problem is that when we use all of this surplus nitrogen and we plug it into the soil, especially if it’s more than the plants can use, which it often is, nitrogen is also super mobile so nitrates will wash away with water super easily then into lakes and rivers into oceans. It allows tiny little plants like algae to grow and proliferate and use up all the oxygen in the water, which creates, I’m sure our listeners have heard of, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Lena: So what you’re saying is that the problem with this process is not the act of taking the nitrogen out of the atmosphere per se, but rather that we’re moving that [00:28:00] nitrogen from a place where it’s not going to go anywhere and putting it into a system where it can end up in places that it’s not supposed to be.
Gabriel: Yeah. It’s like a further disruption of the nitrogen cycle and a further opening of this rift. So I really see it as a very similar kind of environmental issue to carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, that it’s this disruption of an atmospheric ecological cycle that has become so commonplace and so integrated with our systems that it’s made almost invisible despite its disastrous consequences.
Lena: We’re going to have a little musical interlude and then come back and talk about video.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
Lena: Welcome back to Polyculture, monoculture edition. We are now going to. Watch some video game streams and Gabriel is going to tell me how they work and then we’re gonna talk about them.
Gabriel: The first game is Animal Crossing New Horizons, which is one of my favorite games. It’s kind of like a little life simulator where you just walk around you fish, you talk to your neighbors, you pick fruit and you like build your town and build [00:31:00] relationships in this town. It’s very, very chill and pretty, there are some very interesting environmental implications to the way the game constructs, nature and constructs interactions with the nature or the environment, whatever term you choose.
So we’ve got this little person they’re just walking around their island.
Lena: There’s a bale of hay and little pen and some very fluffy trees with some very large cherries on it.
Gabriel: The way the game works, when you move to your island, it has one fruit and you’re able to travel to other people’s islands and get their indigenous crops. And you can plant a cherry: you just dig a hole in the ground and you plant the seed and then like three days, it turns into a cherry tree. And then you can shake the tree to shake down the fruit, and three days later, it will be full of fruit again.
Lena: Wow, [00:32:00] abundance.
It’s kind of the same conquest mentality. Like how much can I reap from like minimal efforts, specifically with the fruit.
Gabriel: You can eat the fruit that you pick and it gives you energy to like pick up a whole tree with your shovel instead of having to chop it down and dig up the stump, but you don’t have to eat to survive.
Lena: That seems like an interesting removal of a limitation.
Gabriel: I know, but the big reason to gather fruit it’s to sell it for money and the exotic fruits that you can sell for more money.
Lena: Whoa.
Gabriel: So the other thing I want to point out when you get to your town. There are all these weeds and you can like pull them up and you can sell them, or you can craft them into things, but they’re very low value and if you have too many weeds in your town, then your town gets like a low [00:33:00] rating. So you like want to clear the land of the indigenous foliage.
Lena: Also just the idea that you can take things out of the ecosystem without it seeming to really impact it at all.
Gabriel: Right, like you can fish like, like the fish and the bugs, like everything in the island is endlessly replenishing, which is kind of in contrast to the like, like the way that this game is made up. It’s like you’re moving to this deserted island to like build a town here. There’s this very weird colonial underpinning. And so like you move to the island and you like exploit everything. There are like specific islands that you can visit to pick all the fruit, to chop down all the trees to catch as many bugs as you can, basically just fill your pockets with stuff.
Lena: Wow, the early [00:34:00] American dream. So basically the point of the game is to exploit your environment as much as possible to become as rich as possible?
Gabriel: All your wealth does go back to the island, but there’s this idea that you’re like investing into your island to make it more, you know, to build bridges, to build little outdoor cafes and play areas.
Lena: Yes. And I mean, that’s a very different kind of wealth than the wealth that is naturally abundant in this ecosystem.
Gabriel: Right
Lena: The bridges don’t make the soil healthier for the peach trees, like the bridges make it easier to keep exploiting it.
Gabriel: In my version of the game, I kind of tried to keep the island as it was showcase the fruit that was there and the trees that are in certain places and yeah, not to develop it too much, which kind of goes against the logic [00:35:00] of the game. There’s also no fertilizer in this game. Like the trees will always produce fruit. There will always be fish. It doesn’t matter where you plant them or like what was growing before?
Lena: Have you gotten to the part in The Overstory with the video game designer? One of the characters is a video game designer, and I’m going to talk about what happens at the end of the book so if you don’t want to hear it you should skip ahead a little bit, but this person basically creates this immersive video game in which you can experience endless species of plants and, you know, environments. And it’s kind of about whoever can colonize best and set up their supply chains and like cultivate their land and fully dominate this imaginary Earth better than everyone else. And all sorts of problems and questions come up about that. Of course, ultimately the book is [00:36:00] about like saving the planet. That story also invokes of a fake video game world to illustrate how finite resources are in the real world and how hungry many humans are to kind of have this experience of being able to endlessly extract and colonized land.
Gabriel: And like the desire always in video games to like simplify things. Not just like, because the parameters of a video game require it to be more simple than real life, but like simplify things in certain ways that make a certain kind of life easier. Like in the case of animal crossing, endless accumulation is very easy. That’s a good transition, I think, to our next game.
Lena: Excellent.
Gabriel: Which is Stardew Valley. So this is another farm simulator [00:37:00] and I love it so much. It’s like very cute and 8-bit. We’re seeing the character traveling on a bus through the mountains and you have this job, our character has this job at Joja Corp, which the logo like looks specifically like Amazon so it’s exploitative organization and he gets a letter from his grandpa that basically says like, he’s willed you his farm in this town called Stardew Valley. And so he leaves his, your character leaves their job at Joja Corp to go be a farmer.
So this is your farm
Lena: There’s house with some stacked logs. There are a bunch of trees and some little plants and some logs on the ground. Looks like there’s some, some grass around the house.
Gabriel: And yeah, you’re inheriting this land and you’re just supposed to work [00:38:00] it. And you come with no money and you just grow crops to sell. I think you do have to eat in this game. There’s this box next to your house, this wooden box. And the mayor is just saying like any crops that you get, just put them in this. And I’ll give you money for them. So that’s kind of the mechanic is you, like you grow crops, you put them in the box and you get money.
Lena: In the crop box!
Is this person just clear cutting their land right now?
Gabriel: Yeah. Now they’re planting seeds in the bare ground and then watering it, watering each seed one by one. Oh, and they found some dandelions. One of my favorite things about this game is that there’s like an emphasis on foraging as.
Lena: That’s cool
Gabriel: Eachseason. There are different forage crops that you can get. Thoughts on the farm system so far?
Lena: It seems a little bit more rooted in reality, but I have the same question about limitations and [00:39:00] consequences of use, which obviously was such a big part of our conversation in the first half of the episode. What happens if you don’t farm responsibly? What happens if you clear cut your land and there’s a big rainfall, like, is your soil going to wash away? Is there going to be a dust bowl in Stardew Valley?
Gabriel: The fertilizer functions to like augment your crops. There’s one fertilizer that will like, I think give you like double your, your crops that you would have. So you have to add fertilizer to the land before you plant, and then it goes away. Like in the system of the game, it seems like all of the fertilizer is taken up by each plant every time you plant it.
Lena: It’s all absorbed.
Gabriel: There is like a Joja Mart in your town that like sells seeds for cheaper than Pierre’s, which is the local shop.
Lena: Monsanto!
Gabriel: Yeah, that part of this, there’s this like [00:40:00] conflict between the corporation and this like small town life.
Lena: That actually sounds like the most realistic part of this so far.
Gabriel: Yeah. I really like it for that reason. So as you accumulate more things like you can go to a mine and mine metal and stuff, and then you can craft multiple things. There’s this like steady narrative of expansion, continual expansion with Stardew Valley.
Lena: So the piece about mining is really interesting to me because it kind of acknowledges the need for a supply chain or, you know, the need for resources that don’t come from your farm but just kind of collapses the whole experience. Generally externalized costs of things that make farming quicker and easier than doing everything by hand.
Gabriel: Yeah. There is the person that we met in the very beginning of the game. She’s like a carpenter. And so there are some things I think you can craft your [00:41:00] own but then some things you have to like take the materials to her and she will make it for you. You are a farmer in your farming alone, but you do have like interdependency, which is something you don’t get from Animal Crossing at all.
Lena: Our next game, Farmville.
Gabriel: I hate it already.
Lena: There are a lot of brown squares and then an assortment of buildings and it looks like some sheep and some things that look like gas pumps.
Gabriel: I think that is what they are.
Lena: That’s wild. Also some maybe goats and a little barn and a tool shed and some tractoring happening and planting, I believe. And the dead brown earth is turning to red earth.
Gabriel: Farmville, it’s one of these games where you have to like, wait for things to happen and then you’ll come back when they’re ready. You have to wait for the gas pumps to [00:42:00] fill up with gas. Then you like use the gas to run your tractor, to like, till all your land.
Lena: I like the imposition of that limitation.
Gabriel: The tractor just like parks itself inside this four by four square of fallow land and it turns it into tilled land.
Lena: It’s also funny, just the way it’s rendered as like when the person scrolls over, you can kind of see the edge of the land. And then by the time they get. It’s just rendered into being more of the tillable land. Like as far as the eye can see you can till and plant. This is clearly large-scale conventional farming based on the equipment they’re using, based on the quantity they’re planning. They are monoculturing. That’s exactly what’s happening right now.
Gabriel: No soil conservation measures taken. “Super fertilizer, use fertilizer after planting crops to receive triple mastery, double bushel [00:43:00] yield, and double XP.”
Lena: That really makes it seem like fertilizing is the way to go. Wow, that harvesting triggers the sound of money in the bank.
Gabriel: So you don’t even have to like collect your crops to sell. They’re just sold as soon as you harvest them.
Lena: And also as with other games, this is one person in one machine doing this work that is generally done by a lot of underpaid people by hand under really harsh conditions.
Gabriel: Any thoughts on Farmville in conclusion?
Lena: I think it’s really striking how all three systems remove the externalized costs and maximize reward. Even though there are different systems with, you know, various limitations. That is what happens when you gamify [00:44:00] working with the natural processes is that you take out like all the nuances and all the extra costs.
Gabriel: You said that like with each game, it’s only one person doing the farming. Especially within American agriculture today, maybe with a monocrop cornfield one person could run through and do their field with a big combine, but with most agriculture, it’s a team and usually a huge workforce. And the farmer is more like the manager of the land than the person actually handling the crops.
My other thought on Farmville is like, it’s the only one that acknowledges petroculture. Contemporary farming in its intensive state is heavily tied in with, with fossil fuels. I like the other games better because they do have this more idealized, agrarian agriculture that I like more, but there is some truth to Farmville [00:45:00], which is interesting.
Lena: Yeah. And the aesthetic of Farmville, just the scale of the land that is being farmed is very evocative of the central valley in California, this part of the country and part of the Earth that is so used and basically worked to death to produce the food that most of this country eats. That’s and it’s like unrelenting.
Gabriel: Okay. I’ve just a couple of questions. One is, why play a farm simulator game? Why do people do it? What’s the appeal?
Lena: I think it’s what we’ve been getting at. As we’ve looked at these simulations, there’s this opportunity to dominate and profit without being tired, without, you know, having to do the work of figuring out how to like deal with all the real challenges. Trying to disrupt an ecosystem in your [00:46:00] favor, without the externalized costs of soil, depletion of labor abuse and abusive people in plants and animals. To that end, you know, it takes the instant gratification element and applies it broadly across the experience of, of farming.
Gabriel: That’s big. I think the other thing is that it’s relaxing. There’s this idea that even though it’s a screen there’s this perception that you’re working with the land and there’s this like simplicity and intimacy to your actions.
Lena: Yeah. And really, really builds on the kind of idealizing of the simple farm life. That imagery is often evoked in ideas like Making America Great Again, and like going back to the good times.
Gabriel: And America Is Back.
Lena: Right, right. And, and saying, you know, “things are complicated now because the people who we usually just invisibilized in this process are now demanding [00:47:00] rights. Like now this is so complicated. Let’s go back to the time when, like we could just externalize our costs and have it be a non-issue”
Gabriel: To your other point about, about the need for accumulation, all three of these games do have this narrative of you come with literally nothing. And then you cultivate or exploit, depending on your perspective, the land and you end up at the end of all of the games with a sizable house, so much land, so much machinery, all of this.
Lena: And that suggests that it’s possible to start with nothing and bootstrap your way up to being successful and profitable, which we know is not a real thing in 99% of cases.
Gabriel: There is something I like about it in a way in that there’s this underlying idea that like, when you have [00:48:00] nothing, you can turn to the soil.
Lena: Yeah.
Gabriel: And you can turn to the planet that like initial impulse, I think is what, what it’s part of that agrarian ideal that people like about the games, I think, but it is something that is worth investing in that idea of where everything starts.
Lena: Yeah. When you need the land will provide, which if you haven’t already destroyed the ability of an ecosystem to replenish itself. The land will always provide, unless we have already done all the things that we have in many cases already done to make that nothing.
Gabriel: Yeah. And that’s the other thing that all three of these games have in common is that the soil plays no role in any of them. Like it’s, you know, in the video game, it’s just this flat rendered layer. The soil is not a character at all.
Lena: No. Right
Gabriel: Like the animals are a character. But the soil is not in all three [00:49:00] systems. This land that does not ever change. Like weeds can grow on it, but like the soil can’t wash away.
What do farm simulators do for cultural ideas of agriculture and of land? Because these games are, I mean, Farmville was a huge thing. Stardew Valley, not so much, but like Animal Crossing was huge, huge, huge, and continues to be.
Lena: I think that these simulators really reinforce the idea that relationship with land is not necessary to create yield from the land. That there’s no requirement of reciprocity or of care. There’s no implication that community or relationship is the thing that will make your practice as somebody who works land viable.
Gabriel: Yeah. And that was those ideas are all kind of like internalized. I’m wondering if there, if it like changes the way people think of food.
Lena: This is the closest [00:50:00] a lot of folks can get as simulating growing. On a screen.
Gabriel: I’d like to think that that there’s some internal desire that everyone’s like aware of the alienation from food systems that we experience, not just want to have the experience of being able to successfully exploit land for your own benefit. You don’t ever hear of anyone being like “I played Stardew Valley and then I decided to work on a farm” because it, you know, like they don’t bring people that next level. People will play the game and be like, okay, I’ve had my little fix of agrarian life.
Lena: But I actually do think that sometimes it is the alienation that leads people to want to farm. Just to bring this back to the reading we did at the beginning of the episode, these farmers simulators can do both things. These simulators either can leave people with the idea that you can in fact, go and exploit your land and [00:51:00] still yield abundance with no consequence, which is, I think the kind of ideology of monocrop farming, or you could look at it and say, this is not realistic.
We know that the earth is in many ways a closed system. There’s no way we could just take stuff from this and have there been repercussion.
Gabriel: Maybe it’s a little romantic, but that idea of alienation that we’re talking about, I think could be seen as a manifestation of this metabolic rift. There are the real harms, there’s the exploitation of labor, there’s the exploitation of soil and of environments globally but then there’s also this, you can kind of feel the rift in yourself. Maybe you can feel this rift of connection from your body to food to place — is felt for me as this alienation.
Lena: Yeah, absolutely.
That was monoculture on the polyculture podcast.
Gabriel: And next episode, we’re going to talk about some more [00:52:00] optimistic agricultural systems in our Permaculture episode.
Lena: Thank goodness.
Gabriel: Yay. We will see you then
Lena: until soon.
Credits: This episode of the Polyculture Podcast was created and edited by Lena Greenberg and Gabriel Coleman. You can find out more about the sources we pulled from in this episode, in the podcast description.
Our theme is by Gabriel Coleman and our musical interlude this episode was Send Us Your Song by Gabriel Coleman. And we mean it! If you have a song or a sound piece you’d like to share, shoot us an email or send us a tweet because we would love to feature it. We’re especially looking to work with BIPOC and queer creators.
Thank you so much again for listening. You’ll hear from us again soon.
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