Why we did this

Why retire from teaching and at age 63 start a farm?

A soon to retire friend of ours recently asked us this. The question might seem easy to answer—anyone who has taught over 30 years during this era of rapid social and technological change like I have might see the attraction in getting off the shooting gallery/hamster wheel teaching has become. But that wasn’t what prompted this radical change. What I taught led directly to the decision to shift fields. So, what did I teach? Basically, the history and theory of political economy, defined as state-market interactions. That covers a lot, even if it sounds narrow.

Political economy focuses on interactions between state power and compulsion versus market incentive and reward. After Mao Zedong had wrecked China’s government and economy—when he died in 1976 some 10 million families owned only a single pair of pants they shared among all members of the family, and not a single lawyer existed or judge with legal education—learning about how government works and how to make good policy that promoted prosperity and social stability became a pretty popular subject in China.

In sum, government officials seek and exercise power. Businesses seek and invest profit. How societies manage the balance and interaction between power and profit makes up the field of political economy. I also taught the development of international political economic institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. These institutions practice political economy across national boundaries. So my professional horizon embraced the history, philosophy and globalization of political economy as a field both of study and practice.

So how did teaching this subject lead to organic, low-carbon farming and building the United States northernmost Net-Zero residence and farm?

Non-specialists often over-estimate government power, and tend to overlook corporate power. Many talk constantly about shrinking government, but fewer complain of corporate monopolies or their interference in policy decisions that should be based on science or proven harm. Corporations can be very powerful, especially when they reach the size of Apple or Amazon. When company operations stretch around the world and when their budgets and incomes get larger than most nations whole Gross National Product, they can be very persuasive to relatively smaller “local” governments. That’s true even of the U.N. That organization has an operating budget smaller than the NY City police department. Many of its programs depend on specific funding from nations and donations from businesses and wealthy individuals. Elon Musk or Bill Gates alone control more wealth than many countries generate in their Gross National Product. Apple’s annual turnover (and profits alone in many cases) exceeds the GNP of all but the largest countries.

While governments tend to monopolize the exercise of military, police, regulatory and taxing power, that power, at least in democracies, rests on the ability of politicians to persuade voters to entrust those powers to them, for a time. Since corporations specialize in persuading consumers to purchase their goods, it’s not a big stretch for them to organize ways to persuade politicians to buy into their policies and accept their donations in exchange for exercising government power in their favor.

If you “follow the money,” taxpayers are a lot like cows (being milked while their attention is diverted) while corporations are like farmers, making the decisions about which cows get fed what and milked when and how. A lot of media, even news, is meant to derail your attention from what really matters—who gets the money and who has the real power.

Politicians market themselves and their policies and are as a consequence subject to market forces of choice and competition. That means they tend to appreciate corporate abilities to persuade and market. That’s why so many politicians seem “packaged.” In a very real sense they are. And that’s also why voters often feel they don’t have a lot of choice and their votes make little difference. While corporations market their products and depend primarily on free choice in an open marketplace, in democracies corporate purchasing and donation power can be very effective in buying politicians and policies that favor their products over the “little guy” to the point that individual voters appear largely powerless to affect politicians’ decisions. Since businesses either outright own or also fund most media via paid advertisements, media tends to also bend toward business preferences.

Truly independent media like The Guardian are very rare. People may blame “the government” for ignoring them, but that seems to be more a matter of politicians’ ears being stuffed with money from big corporations via PACs and corporate funded lobby groups that infest legislatures with dozens of lobbyists per law maker.

This dynamic has led, for example, to fossil fuel corporations being able to frustrate a lot of government action on climate change. Sowing fear and doubt in the face of facts and science has become a specialty of some marketing firms, stemming from the days Big Tobacco fought regulations meant to reduce cancer and other deaths and illnesses from smoking. Some of the same firms that delayed tobacco being declared a cause of cancer are now busily doing the same thing for coal and oil interests. Corporate marketing skill has also led to voter majorities of over 70% in the US being in favor of gun safety regulations like effective universal background checks and forbidding guns in the hands of violent offenders, mentally ill persons, or convicted domestic abusers with restraint orders, being almost universally unimplemented. One power company has managed to nearly stop solar power adoption in the Sunshine State—and do it in the name of “freedom.” Many pesticides, herbicides, and chemical compounds are known to cause harm to humans and, for example, bees, but while the European Union might ban them, the US does not.

But living abroad for many years in China is what most affected our decision to farm organically and live environmentally conscious. We saw first hand the effects of largely unregulated exploitation of the natural environment. The air got so polluted our lungs hurt anytime we went outside, away from our air cleaners. Food testing revealed up to 13 different pesticide residues in fresh greens coming into Hong Kong from mainland China. Very few buildings had insulation, at all, in a climate parallel to that of Havana, Cuba. Air conditioners roared without stop from March to November. Fish regularly died by the thousands as yet another chemical spill took place. If China’s kind of development was the earth’s future, it was clearly unsustainable. And its government, like so many others, resisted efforts to change course or shift priorities.

So, my conclusion was after 30 years teaching and observing, if I wanted action on climate change or eating safe food that doesn’t destroy the environment, I would have to do it myself and persuade others to do it on their own. I didn’t give up working with others to work to persuade politicians to do the right thing, but it seemed far more effective to us to demonstrate how individuals, and by starting a business, corporations could act to bring about needed changes.

The trite sounding phrase, “be the change you seek” sums it up. If “you are what you eat” is true, eating poisoned and polluted food didn’t strike us as sustainable.

So we set up Five Elements Harvest as a Social Purpose Corporation, which is Washington state’s version of a B-corp or Benefit Corporation structure. We have profit as one of our metrics, like any other corporation, but we also have reducing carbon output and educating on a low carbon, environmentally friendly lifestyle as part of the metrics we report on to our customers and to the agencies regulating corporate bodies. And that’s what informed the way we went about setting up and running the farm. We’re not just committed to organic standards and achieving tasty, healthy, food, but also living and farming in a way that regenerates the soil using, as much as possible, renewable energy and carbon lockup methods.

Michael DeGolyer