Sharing or monetising

What happens when you ask a fellow grower to show their work, and why I believe knowledge should not have a price.

To prepare the regenerative market gardening course I taught a few weeks ago at Rasoterra, Yuri and Isabella’s farm in the province of Fermo, I had asked several fellow growers to send me photos and videos of how they work: preparing beds, transplanting, the sequence of operations before and after, and above all how they manage the soil after harvest, between cultivation, mulching, fertilisation and irrigation. These materials were to be the starting point for a theme I consider central: how to generalise a technique without copying it. In any ecological or agricultural context, treating a technique as a recipe to be reproduced unchanged somewhere else is always a mistake. What matters is understanding its principles, its aims, its conceptual steps and the practical tools through which it has been put into practice, and then borrowing it: taking it apart, reassembling it, perhaps in a different order, adapting it to one’s own tools, soil and context, until it becomes a method that works and that evolves over time together with the person practising it, with the farm and, one hopes, with a soil that is regenerating.

Two refusals

The willingness, speed and generosity of the great majority of the growers I have the privilege of working with never cease to surprise me, and I am deeply grateful for it. Now and then, though, something less pleasant emerges. On this occasion one grower declined to send me the materials, arguing that they represent his work, that he too runs paid courses, and that since I would be using them in an activity I am paid for, it would not be fair to hand them over for free. I replied that I understood his position and asked him to tell me what value he placed on those photos and videos, because I consider his methods sound and inspiring and would have considered the offer. The answer was that he would not tell me, convinced that I would not pay anyway.

Something similar had already happened with another farmer I had invited onto the Pionieri podcast. The following day he wrote to say he had thought it over and concluded that it was not in his interest to explain his methods for four hours, because one day he might want to sell them as a course, a workshop or a webinar. I am not naming either of them: they are people whose work I respect, even if I do not share all their values, and they asked me not to name them. Their position is legitimate and I do not think it is wrong. To each his own, as Sciascia put it, or rather the Latin proverb from which his title is taken.

The price of knowledge and the price of time

It could be pointed out that I too run paid courses, and that is true. When I have to travel and be physically present with other people, I usually ask for a fee, because it is work. At the same time, in the hundreds of hours of video freely available on my channel I share almost everything, including difficult moments on our farm and choices I am not particularly proud of, because I believe they can be useful to others.

On this point deep disagreement is possible: I do not believe knowledge should have a price. I do not believe in copyright, and I hold that the freedom to express oneself should be matched by the freedom to receive, and that content of any kind should be free, or at least paid for by the community rather than by the individual who can or cannot afford it. The work of those who produce it should also be supported by the community: not by the state, in which I place no trust, but by a community of whatever size fits one’s political model. What I ask to be paid for, then, is not knowledge but, in some cases, time. A farm’s bills are paid in money, and if I leave the field to do something else the accounts still have to add up. When that time is covered by someone else, as will happen next month in Friuli, where I will be giving free consultations and courses for farmers as part of an EU-funded project, it is ideal: nobody bears the cost personally, and I can make a small contribution to farms that would otherwise have no access to this kind of training.

In the same way, whenever others have asked me for materials, for university presentations or for colleagues’ courses in which whole presentations of mine, or parts of them, have been shown, I have always agreed, asking for neither changes nor credit. After all, what is really mine? I am often reminded that I planted trees on rented land, and that in ten, fifteen or twenty years the owner might ask me to leave. It is possible, and if it happens, it happens. But sooner or later we all have to let go of what we have built, not just a field, and perhaps giving up the habit of seeing things as our own is a useful exercise: it means recognising that what allows us to work is a collective movement, not only human but of the whole ecosystem working on itself, as in the syntropic idea of the macro-organism.

The great majority of new growers, the first generation who do not come from farming families, are extremely generous and collaborative. In some cases, though, what I call old-fashioned entrepreneurship resurfaces: the idea that a piece of knowledge, or a secret, should be guarded and handed over only for payment rather than shared with colleagues. I would like to see, in our small movement too, a more open spirit of sharing.

Those who did share

Since I have spoken, without naming them, of those who preferred not to share their materials, it is only right to name those who made them available with great generosity, and from whom I was the first to learn. Their work, documented on social media and YouTube, deserves to be known.

In Italy: Le Rais farm, Matteo Gercelli’s, in Piedmont; Costapiana, Enrico and Francesca’s farm near Schio; Rasoterra, which hosted the course; Collina Dorata, run by Eleonora Giuliodori and Owen in the Marche, with Eleonora also having told her story on the podcast; Iside, Matteo and Paola’s farm, with their whole team; Mattia Vignoli’s farm in Trentino, highly experimental and small-scale, in a fascinating landscape; Off the Svan, Jacob’s farm near Bolzano; Agroselva, Valerio and Michelle’s, also in Piedmont; La Cabottina, Daniele Meriffi’s, with many interesting experiments; and, perhaps the most significant at a large scale, Antonio Bassan’s farm, whom I interviewed for Pionieri. Among farms abroad I showed Jesse Frost’s Rough Draft Farmstead, of No-Till Growers, and Eric and Anne Nordell’s Beech Grove Farm, which I have written about before: minimum tillage and no-till entirely with draught horses, on a farm that has been profitable for twenty years. Alongside these were some materials from Jean-Martin Fortier, from my former farm in England and from OrtoForesta.

My thanks go to all of them, and to everyone who has given four hours of their time to the podcast. I would like to know what you think, both about those who prefer not to share their work for free and about those who make it available without asking anything in return.

This post grew out of two live videos (in Italian) recorded during the delivery round: the first and the second.