When we think agriculture today we think dependence on BIG Machines that can only be made in Big Factories by Big Companies - that we cannot control or these days afford. This leads to Big Fields - Big Farms and Big Banks.
This is the core of the old model. A few BIG men control a few Big Institutions that control us.
But this model is under real attack.
You had to be BIG to have a Newspaper.
You had to be BIG to have a TV station
But these BIG things have been taken on by small distributed tools that are cheap and can be used in a new way to make BIG things happen. The Power of Big Media is crumbling.
To be BIG you had to control lots of financial capital. To be BIG you have to be centralized.
The New Powerful is based on SMALL that is Connected into a BIG Network. Small cheap blogging tools - small cameras - small editing suites that ALL can afford - connect and combine into the New BIG.
Now this process of small and smart and distributed is about to be applied to Food!
This is an epochal event because Food is always the centre of our main culture. For how we get our Food determines where and how we live and who has power and not.
Food sets our culture.
It was our Hunter gatherer Food Model that shaped us until 10,000 years ago. We are naturally best fitted in small groups tied by purpose. Social Capital was our natural wealth.
It was early farming that settled us and set up the idea of "property" and so a social hierarchy based on a small class that owned the land.
It was mechanized farming that created the modern world - took us off the land and centralized an urban proletariat in mega cities ruled by a small social hierarchy that controlled money.
This video shows us how all this can change again and allow a more distributed system to evolve where the capital that is held most dear is social capital. This is in effect a modern return to a way of being that is more fitted to who we really are as humans.
GVCS in 2 Minutes - High Resolution from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
HT to Ton Zijlstra for this.
We have seen the power of this force in media - we are seeing the old institutions of education trembling. I will introduce you soon to a similar process for health. Many bastions of the old model are creaking or even in their death throes.
The DNA of the New Big is when key tools become small and affordable for most people. They then do small things that aggregate into BIG. All this at a cost that undercuts the old BIG by 100 of times. The Old Big cannot compete. This is a Darwinian process of how humans use their culture to get ahead.
The pieces for the whole new Food Set are coming together as they did a few years back with Media.
Already the ideas of urban agriculture are established. So is the new technology of using natures' rules - Permaculture. We know how to create a new distribution system.
But what we have been missing is the machinery to aid us so that we can do small scale but with leverage.
What happens with Food will then move into industry. For it was the Agricultural Revolution that lead to the Industrial Revolution. If we can apply small scale leverage to Food, we can do the same in manufacturing. Fab Labs offer a hint here.
The last shoe to drop will be energy - we too have to find a worthwhile, local low cost, distributed approach that relies less on financial capital than social capital.
On PEI I think that Biomass may be a step in the right direction.
In the darkness - light!
