This blog has taken a holiday of several months for the birth of my son! Inspired in part by that experience, I was thinking of writing next about healthcare systems in France and the US and their relationship to agriculture, but I think I'll save that for later. 

Today I want to write about an exhibition I saw on a recent trip to Amsterdam, by the Dutch photographer Henk Wildschut. Wildschut's work on food was commissioned by the Rijksmuseum and NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch daily newspaper, as part of an annual initiative known as Document Nederland. The resulting exhibition is titled Document Nederland: Ons dagelijks brood (Documenting the Netherlands: Our Daily Bread) and is on display at the newly renovated (and spectacular!) Rijksmuseum until early January. 

The exhibition (see photo below) only shows a fraction of Wildschut's photographs for the project. More are included in the accompanying book, titled "Food" in the English version, which also features an index with short descriptions of the locations, enterprises and activities represented. The Netherlands claims to be the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, after the US, but it must be neck and neck for that position since you often hear the same claim made for France. In any case, that level of productivity for Dutch agriculture is breathtaking given its tiny geographic area (about one fifteenth the size of France). According to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Dutch agricultural exports totalled €75.4 billion in 2012. 

As those figures suggest, the Dutch agricultural sector is known for its intensity and sophistication. As in so many places, Dutch agriculture has been consolidating dramatically in recent decades, with the number of farms and farm businesses falling and those that remain increasing in both size and output. The sector prides itself on recent environmental gains, however: an OECD study reported dramatic reductions in excess nitrogen and phosphorous, for example. Other innovations involve the use of waste heat for the nation's extensive area of greenhouse production. Indeed, the Netherlands have something like 10,000 hectares of greenhouses, and what strikes you as you move through the landscape is how little of Dutch agriculture is visible to the outsider--which is to say, how little of it takes place outdoors.

That's what's so compelling about Henk Wildschut's documentary project--most of his pictures are taken indoors: in greenhouses growing tomatoes and peppers, in potato-processing plants, in slaughterhouses, in hatcheries and genetics research facilities. In many ways Wildschut's work reminds me of the 2005 documentary film Our Daily Bread, by Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter--it has the same focus on large-scale agricultural production, on standardisation and automation, and on what automation does to animals and to human workers. Geyrhalter's film had no voice-over, no dialogue, and no identifying captions, just the ambient noise of the machines and sometimes the murmuring of the workers in the background, but the overall message was clear: a kind of horror at what our agricultural system has become, how scale and repetition can dehumanise food production. 

Wildschut provides a bit more context with his descriptions, and at first glance the message appears to be a similar one: vast antiseptic interior environments with concrete floors, stainless steel machinery, and workers isolated in their protective clothing; uniform tomato plants under glass as far as the eye can see; conveyor belts transporting newly hatched chicks to be de-beaked and then placed in the cages where they will grow into meat. Interestingly, however, Wildschut includes a statement in which he says that he came out of the project with fewer fixed ideas than he had when he began:

So Wildschut's point is subtler, or at least more clearly articulated: automation and industrialisation are causing agriculture to lose its human scale, but equally important is the fact that agriculture has moved indoors, and it has done so for a variety of reasons, not least of which is disease control. This is an issue that affects organic producers as well as conventional ones: there are plenty of organic producers out there, for example,both large and small, moving into high tunnel production in part because it creates a more controlled environment and can thus reduce disease pressure. Indeed a basic principle of organic pest management is to rely on hygiene and sanitation instead of chemical pesticides. Similarly, I've spoken with organic pig producers in Iowa who talk about their need to isolate themselves from big conventional hog facilities that are "sinks for pig diseases". It's a landscape-scale issue, with everyone trying to isolate themselves from everyone else. (Wildschut's description of Dutch "designated agricultural development areas", known as LOGs and intended precisely to make it easier to prevent and control disease outbreaks, is fascinating in this regard.) 

But what does this mean for someone like me, who has always been interested in agriculture in part because of its role as a creator and shaper of landscapes? How do the aesthetics of agricultural landscapes relate to our understanding of agricultural systems? The Dutch of course have a long-standing and important heritage of landscape painting, including agricultural landscapes, as you have only to go elsewhere in the Rijksmuseum to appreciate. Looking more closely at Wildschut's photographs, you realise that only a small handful have a visible sky, and often it's a sky glimpsed through a screen or distorting glass, as though he is purposely frustrating our impulse to think of farming as something that takes place outside, that involves wind and sun and fresh air. Wildschut calls this "a consumer-driven romanticized ideal". You have to wonder too what this trend will do in the long run to farming as a profession, given the frequency with which farmers speak of working outdoors as a major factor in their choice of career. 

In the meantime, however, this issue of visibility presents a major public-relations dilemma for the agricultural sector--or maybe it's better to say a major public-information dilemma for consumers. As Wildschut observes, farmers and farm businesses may not be hidden away indoors because they're specifically seeking to hide how they operate, but the effect is the same. The days when you could drive or take a train or even cycle through the countryside and learn a few things about the local agricultural scene seem to be disappearing. 

A few months ago I saw a documentary called "Désobéissance civile", screened in Dijon as part of an annual film series organized by the alter-globalization group ATTAC. (For more about ATTAC, see note below.) Released in 2005, the film was less polished than I was expecting, but it was interesting in that it sought to make a case for anti-GMO activism as an example of civil disobedience. It traced the civil disobedience tradition from Henry David Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King, emphasizing the citizen's right--some would say obligation--to refuse to conform to an unjust law and the importance of non-violent action as a means of doing so. 

After the film screening, a small group of faucheurs volontaires--individuals who have committed themselves to the voluntary destruction of GM crop trials and/or production fields--spoke about their experiences. It was a sobering testimonial. French law views such actions as "a serious group destruction of property", punishable by up to 5 years in prison and €75,000 in fines for first-time offenders (penalties may be doubled for repeat offenders). The faucheurs at the Dijon event spoke about the fines and legal fees they face, the knowledge that their future employment prospects will be permanently affected by their faucheur volontaire status, and their commitment to the cause nonetheless. In France, dozens of anti-GMO activists have received prison terms of up to several months; in some cases, they have been ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of euros in damages to companies such as Pioneer and Syngenta. 

Contrast this to the situation in the UK, where, according to Matthew Reed, who writes about anti-GM activism as an element of the global organic movement in his book Rebels for the Soil (Earthscan, 2010), "British direct action protests [have been able to build] on an established legal defence in cases of non-violent direct action, that the sincerity of the protesters meant that they could escape the most severe sanctions of the law" (p117). A series of cases brought against anti-GM activists in the UK in 2000 and 2001 ended in acquittals, leading to a situation in which (according to an article in the Guardian) protesters "play up the amount of damage they have done in order to have their cases heard by juries, while companies... play down the damage done to their products in order for their cases to be heard in magistrates courts away from what are widely seen as 'fickle' juries".  

Thus alter-globalization activists seek to do battle with international corporations pursuing planet-wide research, production and marketing strategies, but must nevertheless contend with distinct national legal regimes. Despite the arguments made by the documentary, GM crop-destruction activists in France have had difficulty making the legal case that theirs is a crime of conscience, and should be treated as such. The faucheurs volontaires have also sought to mount a defense based on France's Charte de l'environnement, granted constitutional status in 2004. Article 1 of the Charter states that "Chacun a le droit de vivre dans un environnement équilibré et respectueux de la santé"--every citizen has the right to a healthful and wholesome environment. Not surprisingly, the full legal and regulatory ramifications of the Charter have yet to be worked out. 

At left: A poster calling for support of 60 faucheurs volontaires facing trial in June 2012 for destruction of GM grapevines at an INRA research station in September 2011. 

Activists also operate within different cultural traditions of public demonstration. In my experience, one of the things American alternative agriculture advocates can't help but admire about French farmers is their flair for dramatic protest. Of course, the French in general are adept at staging public protests (a few weeks ago I witnessed a drive-in organized by a group calling itself "Auto-écoles en colère"--Angry Driving Schools). But French farmers can show real creativity in this regard, and they have great material with which to do so. The mass "invasion" of the Champs Élysées in Paris the weekend of May 23, 2010, for instance--organized by the group Jeunes Agriculteurs (JA), a large and influential young farmers' association--was a public relations masterpiece: working through the night, more than a thousand JA members transformed the famous boulevard into a temporary "farm", with virtually every French agricultural sector represented--vegetable growers, cereal and oilseed crop producers, wine-grape growers, dairy farmers and more. Tens of thousands of Parisiens turned out to admire the results. There were fields of mustard in full bloom, pyramids of fresh vegetables neatly arranged in their wooden crates, corrals of sheep bedded down on clean straw... politicians publicly applauded the event, while citizens posted blog comments saying things like, "If Paris were like this all the time, I could take my vacation there!" 

Both Matthew Reed and Chaia Heller, in her new book Food, Farms, and Solidarity: French Farmers Challenge Industrial Agriculture and Genetically Modified Crops (Duke, 2013) seek to connect the success of the alternative and organic agriculture movements with farmers' strategic deployment of anti-GM activism. Both recount the events of the summer of 1999, when José Bové and other members of the Confédération Paysanne (the leftist French farmers union) gained international media attention for their action against a McDonald's in the town of Millau. Both also note how the McDonald's protest was more successful in this regard than the anti-GM crops protests Bové and the Confédération had been engaged in earlier that year--for Heller in particular, the McDonald's protest gave Bové the platform he needed to gain real public attention on the GM issue, in turn helping to make the European Union one of the few global regions where GM crops have yet to take hold. 

Indeed, Heller goes further, arguing that French farmers (or at least, French farmers belonging to the Confédération Paysanne) are unique in the world in having mounted successful political opposition to the assumptions of conventional agriculture:

It's certainly true that farmers and others have had less success in opposing the spread of GM crops in the US than here in Europe. (Although again, the networks are global--a year or so ago I heard a talk given by the research director of a prominent agricultural research institution in the UK, who mentioned that they were working on a GM wheat, and that while their primary field sites were located in England, they had them replicated at sites in the US, "so we know we'll have results." And as others have pointed out, the French livestock sector is heavily dependent on imported GM soya from South America.) 

Still, I can't help feeling that the US farmers' side of this story remains to be told: early activism by US dairy farmers against rBST was instrumental in preventing it from gaining market dominance in the US, even after it was approved by the FDA, while at the same time giving a boost to the organic dairy sector. Speaking more broadly, key organic and sustainable farmers' organizations in the US--Practical Farmers of Iowa, the Land Stewardship Project, California Certified Organic Farmers, and many others--maintain an active and tireless presence in Washington DC (working largely through the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition) and have had a real impact in shaping policy to support organic and sustainable farming in the US. Their work may be less dramatic than their French colleagues', but even in France, the policy battles have to be fought inch by inch and day by day, long after the dust has settled following the demonstrations in the fields or in the streets. 

***

(Note for fanatical translators: ATTAC was founded in France in 1998, and stands for Association pour la taxation des transactions financières et pour l’action citoyenne, according to the French site--Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Citizen Action. The international ATTAC site renders this slightly differently, however, as Association pour la taxation des transactions financière et l'aide aux citoyens--Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens. Thus the non-French version has been rendered less overtly militant in its posture--as a call to aid rather than a call to action.)

One of the many interesting things about living overseas is observing the gap between the image of the country held by one's compatriots and the impressions one gains first-hand. An example here in France is "French roast coffee," which in the US means a very dark, oily roast but which from what I have seen doesn't appear to exist in France--you won't find dark roast coffee in the supermarket, and you won't find it in a specialty coffee shop either. Where did this idea come from--was dark roast coffee popular in France in some earlier era? Or is it just someone's marketing strategy that has been so successful as to become ubiquitous? 

Another term I have wondered about is "biodynamic French intensive gardening" or "French biointensive gardening"--passionately evoked in some organic farming and gardening circles in the US but which no French person I know has ever heard of. A little online sleuthing indicates that the origin of the idea in the US lies in the work of Alan Chadwick, creator of the famous garden project at the University of California--Santa Cruz in 1967. According to a retrospective written in 2007 by Chadwick Garden manager Orin Martin and published in the UCSC Farm & Garden News & Notes, "French intensive gardening" is the system "pioneered, not invented, by Chadwick" and still used at the UCSC Farm & Garden today. It consists of permanent beds, deep digging by hand, intensive spacing of plants, intercropping, careful attention to composting, an emphasis on transplanting as opposed to direct seeding and high labor inputs. Robert Kourik offered a similar summary in an article appearing in the Los Angeles Times in 1987. 

Both Kourik and Martin say that Chadwick's system was a synthesis of several elements, most importantly Steinerian biodynamic thinking and the techniques of French market gardeners as perfected on the outskirts of Paris in the late 19th century. Both also note that the system was subsequently popularized by John Jeavons in his book, How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition. It was Jeavons who shortened the name to "biointensive gardening." Martin explains that the UCSC Farm & Garden staff dropped the biodynamic references after Chadwick's departure from the project, preferring the term "French intensive gardening" as less esoteric. 

Martin also cites a couple of books published in England in the early years of the 20th century describing contemporary French market gardening techniques. This literature appears to reflect Chadwick's vision of French market gardening at its height, and is no doubt worth looking at more closely. Another such account can be found in the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin's book Fields, Factories and Workshops, first published in England in 1899. Kropotkin, who had lived in both France and England, describes the culture maraîchère in the area around Paris: the extensive use of transplants, the careful attention to the soil, the labor-intensive quality of the management. Market gardens thrived in this area not because of the proximity to Parisian markets, Kropotkin notes (in fact "a great number... export the whole of their produce to England"), but because of their ready access to Parisian stable manure, which they used not just for enriching the soil but also for heating their glasshouses and forcing beds. 

In the 1912 edition of his book, Kropotkin emphasizes that English market gardening is likewise admired by Continental gardeners, and that French market gardening has "been lately introduced into England, with several manuals hav[ing] been published for that purpose." Finally, he sounds a cautionary note: 

Alan Chadwick's work establishing the UCSC garden was famously labor-intensive; but Orin Martin and others qualify this aspect of the system, noting that once you have established your beds and improved your soils, too much digging can be as dangerous as too little. 

My views of French gardening are shaped in part by my experiences tending an allotment garden on the outskirts of Dijon. Compared to allotment gardens I've seen in England, the garden site here looks typically "French"--the plots are rigorously geometric, with cinder paths forming the main allées and a notable preference on the part of most of the gardeners for bare soil over the use of mulch. Is this French intensive gardening? Apart from the fact that I have never seen tomatoes in a French garden that were not interspersed with marigolds, you don't find a lot of companion planting or intercropping. Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, former INRA researchers who now operate a soil-management consultancy not far from Dijon, have written extensively about the loss of organic matter and soil biological activity in many French agricultural soils. As for myself, I have never worked such a heavy clay soil as the one in my Dijon garden, and I've had trouble finding a good source of quality, bulk compost. Perhaps this is linked to the French habit of pollarding most urban trees, with the result that there are fewer leaves available for urban composting?