This is the second extract from The Wealth of Counties. Last Wednesday’s blog dealt with the Male Preserves of Work and Money. Women are more practical and worry about things like Food and Shelter. If anywhere can be self-sufficient in food then its the Garden of England...at least in essential foods. Coffee & tea will always need to be imported. But there are also local substitutes...Silver Birch Wine for Grape Wine; Chamomile Tea for China Tea and so on. Good Food must be a labour of love. So we'll start by appointing a Master Gardener in each of our Parish Regions. There'll be 500 of them. What else will they need? Six Journeymen Gardeners under the direction of each Master Gardener…each with five apprentices a-piece? Good! What is their job exactly?
These Master Gardeners of ours have sworn an oath. Let’s call the Soil Doctors oath the Hebenshausen Oath by analogy with the Hippocratic Oath of the Body Doctors. The charter of their guild requires that they prepare a beautiful garden in their parish. It sets quality and not quantity as the standard. The Journeymen's Guild requires them to be responsible for distributing produce and determining the disposal of surpluses. The Apprentices owe allegiance and obedience to their Master Gardener which means specifically to do his bidding. In practice this will entail providing for the food needs of a particular group of families. So that's sorted out the permanent staff.
But it's not enough hands for our task. What about those 300 000 privileged young people over the age of eleven...the Idle Young? There's no such thing as a free lunch. We'll invent School Enterprises and give them the job of milking cows, bringing in the harvest and making cider. Let's draft in half of them each year. That should do it. And that's a job for the apprentices. Recruit from the Hundred…for there are 100 families in their care…ten persons to help look after the garden of these thirty to fifty families. There, that wasn't hard. We've got ourselves a Food Workforce. Here they are rearing to go. All they want to know is how much they're going to get paid. Well let's work it out.
A Good Day's Pay can be related to the cost of a home by assuming that it is reasonable for one day of a good week's pay to go to pay for shelter. £ 2 500 a year for seven years gets a family of three a house. That's £ 48 per week which puts our work in the fields at a basic rate of £ 16 per person per day. For much of the year these Food Workers may only need to work an hour or so a day. So converting this to an hourly wage makes little sense. We take a long view.
If you are doing your job we'll hear about it...just as soon as if you are not doing your job...from those most affected. It's in nobody's interest that people should make work or look busy. This is a most interesting thing. Right at the very heart of our system of Just Wages the fixed hourly wage with its clocking on is condemned as contra natura and the parable of the vineyard in the Christian New Testament is seen to be the sensible way to relate work to pay.
Will you work for that? The Ayes have it so apprentices are on £ 80 a week. We'll give them four weeks unpaid leave and a Christmas Bonus to bring their salary to £ 4 000. No reason not to put the youngsters on the same pay scale. Jesus of Nazareth was a first rate political economist as Bernard Shaw pointed out and this is what he would have done. We only need them for a few months of the year so we'll budget £1 000 a year each. Some related graduated salary scales for our Journeymen and Master Gardeners and there you have it…and here is the annual wage bill.
500 Master Gardeners at £20 000, 3000 Journeymen at £10 000, 15000 Apprentices at £4 000 and 150 000 Self-Helpers at £1000. An annual Food Wage Bill of a quarter of a million pounds to feed a million and a half people. That's £500 per household per year...plus some help bringing in the harvest. There will be overheads...but fertilisers and pesticides will not be among them. Equipment, barns, sheds, so perhaps the final price will be 50% more. Does the number of people make sense? We are putting 300 youngsters between 11 and 25 under the wing of 30 apprentice gardeners in each parish producing food for 3000 people. That's 337 people out of 3000 or 11% involved in food production. Or if you make allowance for the fact that the youngsters are only involved for a quarter of the year then the percentage drops to below 4% of the parish or 12% of the current working population.
Half of England's food needs are currently produced with 6% of the working population so without regard for land, we are at least putting in sufficient people to feed Kent even with efficiencies of one half of conventional agriculture. But in fact Horticulture is reckoned to be about five times as efficient as Agriculture in terms of Production per Acre so in practice this workforce probably has the potential to produce substantial surpluses of staples as well as an abundance of more exotic vegetables...particularly as we get clever with the use of greenhouses.
And so to Animal Husbandry. Fifty years ago John Seymour bought a Jersey House Cow. This one act forced the Seymours a long way along the road to Self-Sufficiency and a Peasant Economy because having bought a cow you soon find there are a lot of other things to do. The Seymour Family could not consume four gallons of milk a day and had not learnt to turn surplus milk into cheese. So they had to get some other animals to feed it to. They could scarcely feed it back to the cow…for that would somehow be unseemly…so they had to buy pigs. And what was to be done with all that dung? The Seymours extended their gardening and farming activities to make good use of it.
