New York is a rat race, and the rats are winning.
OLIVER DOUGLAS, Green Acres
I am not a fan of the old Green Acres TV show, but I do remember Oliver Douglas leaving his conventional life in the city for the more intentional life of being a farmer in the country. I think living more intentionally is laudable. People yearn for a simpler life, and life in the country promises that simplicity.
This return to an agrarian way of life has had many flavors. You have the Amish who live much like they did in previous centuries. You have right wing conservatives who homestead as a way of prepping for social collapse. You have hippies who took inspiration from The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News. I have seen agrarian movements among Protestants and the Orthodox. Then, there is the creature known as the Catholic Land Movement.
CLM adherents tend to be traditionalist Catholics favoring the Latin Mass and reverent forms of piety. They tend to have large families, and their desire to return to the land comes from a wish to spend more time with those families while also feeding them. What could be wrong with that? The problem is that many who obey the call to return to the land find the dream does not match the reality. They make critical errors that doom them to failure. These are the errors I see in the Catholic Land Movement.
1. G.K. Chesterton was a city slicker and a socialist.
When you listen to Catholic Land Movement speakers, you will hear G.K. Chesterton's name and quotations repeated. I think it is safe to say that Chesterton is the intellectual father of the CLM and Distributism. The problem with Chesterton is that he never actually practiced what he preached. He never farmed or milked a cow or even had children. Why does this matter? Men such as this are detached from the reality of what they are advocating. I am a big believer in empirical data which means getting your hands dirty with the actual doing of the thing and not merely the teaching of the thing. Those who actually have taken up the call to return to the land report a different experience after the shine of the fantasy has worn off.
It was Timothy Gordon who pointed out that Chesterton was a Fabian socialist and argues that Distributism is essentially a socialist system at its core. I agree with Gordon. On paper, Distributism sounds splendid with its advocacy of widespread property ownership. The problems come when trying to create that order of widespread property ownership. This is when Distributism becomes redistributism which is utterly socialist.
Why does this matter? Socialism is an unworkable fantasy. History is replete with what happens with socialism with the advocates excusing its failure by saying the socialism wasn't done the right way. From my perspective, Distributism is an attempt to do socialism the right way. I don't think such a right way can ever exist.
Because of Chesterton, the Catholic Land Movement amounts to a sales job for a load of shit. Don't listen to the salespeople. Listen to the people who have actually done it. These people find out why people left the farm for city life. City life is less work and smells better.
2. Meat, dairy, and eggs are bad for your health and wallet.
I went on a plant based diet back in 2012 and have remained on it to the present day. I am happy to report that you will not starve to death abstaining from meat, dairy, and eggs. Your health will improve, and your grocery bill will decrease. People who adhere to meat based eating will disagree, but these folks are not reading the information that made me switch to this way of eating. Like most idiots, they read the information that confirms and reaffirms their bias instead of looking at the empirical data. What does this have to do with the Catholic Land Movement?
Whenever I see anything involving a Catholic homesteader, it involves meat. CLM advocates love beef, pork, lamb, chicken, eggs, cheese, and on and on. After the Chestertonian propaganda at a CLM conference, the next most popular topic involves butchering meat. I think it is safe to say that CLM people are meatheads. That love of meat and animal products is the Achilles heel of their movement.
Raising livestock for food is labor intensive and expensive. You can neglect your vegetable garden in the winter, but your animals have to keep eating. To feed those animals, you have to either grow feed or buy feed for those animals. This amounts to buying groceries to feed to your groceries. I think this is just utterly stupid. I still can't wrap my brain around the economics of this. As vegan advocates point out, it is cheaper (and more ethical) to feed the grain to humans than to cattle for the sake of eating filet mignon. Whether you agree or disagree with those tree hugging hippie types, they make a valid point. Meat eats up resources and real estate. Feeding cows and pigs takes way more food than feeding your kids. The acreage needed for a vegetable garden to feed a family is small in comparison to the acreage needed to feed livestock.
What is the result of this meat focused agrarianism? This would be poor health and poverty. On a personal level, raising and eating meat is unsustainable. Whenever I see someone doing this sort of thing, I always want to see the numbers which would be the ledger book for their finances and the numbers for their blood work.
The bottom line is that meat is a luxury. In our current first world existence, this truth is anathema. Yet, historically, meat was consumed only on special occasions and not three times a day in the present world. The portions were also much smaller. Meat was not a staple. Grains and legumes were the staples and were the fuel for civilization. Wheat, rice, barley, oats, and potatoes are the fuel for humanity. When old farms had an animal, it usually had a plow behind it.
Now, I am a Roman Catholic, and people ask me why I follow a vegan diet thinking I have a religious reason for doing so. My diet is not tied to my religion, but it is not in conflict with it either. The fact is that vegetarianism has existed for centuries among monastic orders especially those following the Rule of Saint Benedict. This vegetarianism was mainly for mortification, but you can see how growing vegetables in gardens would serve as a more sustainable way of feeding monks and nuns than raising pigs and cows. This has been very successful for them. Unlike the failed Catholic Land Movement of Great Britain from a century ago, I think this monastic vegetarian model represents a more sustainable way to go for Catholics wanting to get back to the land.
Do I think Catholic homesteaders will abandon meat farming? Of course not. This usually comes after the bank forecloses on the land or someone has a coronary event. Either way, you end up in the same place. I prefer choices over consequences.
3. Mortgages and debt are homestead killers.
I am always amazed to hear homesteaders and CLM people who buy their property, supplies, and equipment with debt. That, Gentle Reader, is a recipe for disaster. Many of the farmers who went bust in the Great Depression did so as a consequence of being unable to repay their debts on homes, barns, tractors, land, and seed. This doesn't get discussed enough. If your homesteading dream requires financing, you need to let it go. You might tolerate a crop failure and bad weather, but the bank expects to get paid. It behooves you to own your stuff versus renting the money from the bank for that stuff.
4. Your adult children ain't staying to work the homestead.
Another factor that dooms the CLM is the lack of a retirement plan. Like it or not, people keep living long after their productivity has declined because of age, illness, and injury. The belief amongst trad Catholics is that their large number of children will stick around and provide the labor needed for their "golden" years. This is utterly laughable. It assumes two things. The first is that they will want to spend their years slaving away on the farm to keep feeding you. The second is that these adult children will not have their own large families to feed and support. There is a reason many left the farms for the factories and big city life. That reason has not changed.
This is also another reason to stick to backyard vegetable gardening. The garden is much kinder to the older person than working animals. Plus, you are more likely to live to be older eating plants instead of animals.
5. The Catholic Land Movement is more about the philosophy (and the fantasy) than the practicality of growing your own food.
The honest fact is that the hippie homesteaders do better than Catholic homesteaders when it comes to living off the land. Part of that comes from hippies being less meatcentric and more reality based in their strategies. Catholic Land Movement people strike me as LARPers living a fantasy on a crash course with reality. I have learned to not listen to these Chestertonians as they smoke their pipes and talk about living life in the "shire." If you want to know the real story, ask their wives and children who have to endure the fantasy they didn't choose.
Conclusion
I am 100% for living a more intentional and simpler lifestyle in conformity with your values. This is why I can agree with the desires of the Catholic Land Movement. I just disagree with the strategy. I believe in reality based strategies over fantasy based strategies. The Catholic Land Movement amounts to fighting a just war against a modern foe carrying a broadsword and dressed in a suit of armor. Until these LARPers get a clue, their movement is doomed.
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