I recently attended the conference of Front Porch Republic, a website I sometimes write for. FPR’s motto is “Place, Limits, Liberty,” all of which I’m quite fond of, and I very much enjoyed spending a few days hanging out with likeminded people. Not that many people are opposed to these values, but the middle of the three doesn’t get much attention.
Part of the reason we don’t spend much time talking about limits is the particularly American fondness for rugged individualism. There’s something of a collective allergy — I experience it myself — when people tell us not to do things, whether or not there’s a good reason for the rule.
But I also think limits are just hard. I don’t mean limits as in the limits on clearly harmful unlawful behavior, I mean limits that seek to promote some collective good, while balancing real tradeoffs. To make the point a little more concrete, think about farming.
It is obvious to me that when it comes to farm size there is a balance to be struck between scale and the health of the broader community. On one extreme you have subsistence agriculture, in which almost everyone in a society has to inefficiently work their own small piece of land just to eke out enough calories to live on. Any disruption — illness, weather, a plague of locusts — can be a literally existential threat.
On the other extreme you have the system we now live with. No one is starving, but few of us have any connection to the land. Ever larger (and now ever more autonomous) machines do the work of producing vast amounts of corn and soy, and factory farms produce vast amounts of commodity chicken and pork.
While I very much prefer the current paradigm to subsistence, I am frustrated by our collective inability to choose the happy medium that obviously exists. While it’s true that smaller farms are not as efficient as larger, the difference is not immense. A two thousand acre operation can produce food far more cheaply than a twenty acre farm, but only marginally more cheaply than a two hundred acre farm. Whether dairy, grain, beef, chicken, pork, or anything else, there is a middle ground in which agriculture can be extremely productive while consisting of independently owned farms rather than massively consolidated “farms.”
But even if the plausibility of that outcome is obvious, and even if most people would agree that it’s preferable, how to bring it about is a devilishly difficult question. What limits could we put in place to make it a reality? We could pass laws limiting the total acres of any operation, but that would have to vary hugely according to the locale and the type of agriculture; a beef farm in temperate New York can produce much more per acre than one in arid Wyoming.
And even if we did pass such laws, there would be the perpetual fight to prevent the establishment of byzantine ownership structures to stay within the letter of the regulations while actually defying them — a parent organization might control dozens of “independently owned” farms via long term lease agreements. Very possibly we would end up with the system we have now, only with more steps.
Further, this would have to be coupled with strict tariffs, so that food produced in countries with less stringent requirements couldn’t undercut the domestic market. As I discussed in a recent post, we already have some of these restrictions in place with foods like beef, and their administration is both complex and subject to political influence.
I can broadly imagine a legal framework that could put what I would consider reasonable limits on agriculture, but I cannot imagine the specifics. That doesn’t mean there aren’t workable legal approaches, but I do think we should be very careful of taking them, and we should be very skeptical of anyone who claims to have an easy answer.
But laws aren’t the only way to do things. There are all sorts of social norms most of us abide by most of the time, even though they are not legal matters, everything from waiting in line to not watching videos in public with the volume turned up.
The Amish are an extreme example, in that they really do make all sorts of sacrifices, which is to say, they put lots of limits on themselves, to be members of their communities. Everything from what they where to the technologies they can use and when has to be collectively agreed on.
I hardly need say that most of us aren’t going to become Amish, but I do wonder if there’s a way to import some of their ethic into the broader world. One speaker at the conference described a pledge shared by a big group of parents to enforce certain technological limits in their children’s lives. It is hard to individually choose to not give a kid a phone or social media, but it is easier in the context of a collective agreement.
Critically, this negative — limits on technology — came with positives. The group organized technology free concerts, dances, museum outings, and other activities. Rather than being a pure negative, it came with fun alternatives for kids to do instead of being on screens.
When it comes to food, lots of the messaging trades on fear. Industrial food is unhealthy, or cruel, or bad for the environment. All of these are worth knowing. But I think the lesson here is that there also need to be communal celebrations of local food if we want the movement to grow.
If a positive engagement with local food can crowd out the worst parts of the food system, that’s all to the good. While I don’t see any possibility for the sort of explicit, collective limits that work for technology, I do think a shared focus on the goods of local farming can begin to lay the foundations for a shared ethic of how to eat and how to keep farms in our communities.