Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that agricultural labour can never be appropriately compensated in a capitalist political economy because of the necessity of keeping food accessible. Utopian spatial and temporal reorganisations of society that fundamentally address metabolic rifts are proposed.

Paper long abstract:

Small, ecologically-oriented farms in the Global North have become popular places for individuals to voluntarily exchange their labour for experiential learning and room and board in lieu of wages. Despite this 'free' labour, such farms almost invariably struggle financially, with reported farmer salaries suggesting many live below defined poverty lines. Critical scholarship has argued that this situation amounts to farmers' 'self-exploitation', and that moral economy framings of these circumstances both obscure and exacerbate systemic inequities. While some critics recognise the myriad value forms that exist alongside exchange value in these spaces, such critiques have difficulty imagining futures outside of a capitalist political economy, and make recommendations accordingly. This paper follows the Graeberian (2001) assertion that (Marxian) critical analyses lack the ability to imagine alternatives beyond capitalism while following the (Maussian) impulse to seek post-capitalist futures. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at ecological farms in Italy and Finland, I argue agricultural labour can never be appropriately compensated in a capitalist political economy, and suggest that the critique of 'self-exploitation' is an unhelpfully reductive analysis, particularly for scholar-activists engaged in and with alternative food networks (AFNs). I use the concept of 'ecological livelihoods' (Miller 2019) as a basis for proposing degrowth-oriented futures that don't take monetary value forms or continued reliance on immigrant agricultural labour as natural or common-sense solutions, and instead attend to metabolic rifts by toying with utopian ideas of radical spatial and temporal societal reorganisations that re-embed food and farming work into everyday life.