Menu
Hi, and welcome to my site. I’m an author, small-scale farmer and sometime academic social scientist, writing about this moment of vast change as the dynamics of climate, energy, politics and natural ecosystems upend familiar assumptions about how the world is supposed to work. I’ve written two books, numerous articles and a long-running blog that looks at all this from a variety of angles, but mostly grounded in the belief that we need to develop low-energy localisms that give people the means to make a practical livelihood from their surrounding ecological base – a small farm future, the title of my first book.
Do have a look around my site, and contribute to the discussion if you wish.
Please note that although my blog is long-running, this is a new site as of June 2023 and there are parts of it that I’m still building, so you may find that the content is cursory in places.
Chris
My new book, critiquing food techno-fixes and making the case for local food systems
The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods
https://vetsalus.com/news/2024/01/book-review-saying-no-farm-free-future-chris-smaje
One of the few voices to challenge The Guardian’s George Monbiot on the future of food and farming (and the restoration of nature) is academic, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future Chris Smaje. In Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, Smaje presents his defense of small-scale farming and a robust critique of …
https://vetsalus.com/news/2024/01/book-review-saying-no-farm-free-future-chris-smaje
My first book
Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
“As a breakdown of the climate, state power and globalized markets pushes us toward an epochal transition, Chris Smaje offers us a hopeful vision of a relocalized, self-sufficient world. With fierce intelligence and rich evidence, he explains the vital role that small farms must play in this emerging future, artfully weaving together neglected strands of economic, ecological, cultural and political thought.”
David Bollier, director, Reinventing the Commons Program, Schumacher Center for a New Economics; coauthor (with Silke Helfrich) of Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
From the back cover: “A Small Farm Future is a ground-breaking debut, destined to become a modern classic – planting a flag at the intersection between economics, agriculture and society during a time of immense crisis. Farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje makes the case for organising human societies around small-scale, …
“As a breakdown of the climate, state power and globalized markets pushes us toward an epochal transition, Chris Smaje offers us a hopeful vision of a relocalized, self-sufficient world. With fierce intelligence and rich evidence, he explains the vital role that small farms must play in this emerging future, artfully weaving together neglected strands of economic, ecological, cultural and political thought.”
David Bollier, director, Reinventing the Commons Program, Schumacher Center for a New Economics; coauthor (with Silke Helfrich) of Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
I’ve been blogging about farming, ecology and politics since 2012. I welcome well-tempered discussion. Please note that if you’re a new commenter, or if you include a lot of links, your comment will go into the moderation queue before publication. I sometimes miss comments in the queue so feel free to nudge me via the Contact Form if your comment fails to appear.
Posted on February 11, 2024 | 102 Comments
When people look back nowadays to medieval philosophy, they often dismiss it with the derisive remark that it was concerned with debating “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”. The sense is of an era whose thinkers engaged in sterile intellectual gymnastics founded on flawed premises. It’s an unfair characterization, which reveals more about the modern people who say it than the medieval objects of their contempt. Still, sometimes I wonder if there are aspects of our contemporary intellectual chitchat that might invoke angels-on-a-pin type dismissals from people in the future. One candidate could be the …
Continue readingPosted on January 22, 2024 | 61 Comments
Michael Daw has written a blog post that criticises my arguments concerning the energetic implausibility of manufactured food (or ‘precision fermentation’ to use the biotech industry’s preferred term). I don’t think his arguments stack up, as I’ll explain below, but this seems like a good opportunity to run through the relevant issues, which is the aim of this post. It will be followed by a few more posts on various issues relating to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and some of the criticisms of it, before I turn to other issues. One thing I must do at …
Continue readingPosted on January 1, 2024 | 99 Comments
A brief post today to wish Small Farm Future readers a happy new year and to give a preview of plans for this blog in 2024. In the coming week, I’ll be at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, joining a panel with Lord Deben, chair of the Climate Change Committee, Kyle Lischak of Client Earth and the inimitable Rosie Boycott to discuss the role of agroecological farming in the transition to net zero. So … should you accept this assignment, you have roughly one day to get back to me with your suggestions for what I should say. If you’re at …
Continue readingPosted on December 9, 2023 | 80 Comments
In a couple of weeks, my wife and maybe me will be packing and delivering the last veg boxes ever to issue from Vallis Veg, the business partnership she and I established in 2008, and we will be closing the business down. It won’t, I hope, be the last time any produce is grown or sold on our site, as I’ll explain below. Indeed, we’re excited about the new projects on the site that running the market garden has held us back from developing. But it will be the last time we sell produce under present business arrangements. Ironically, the …
Continue reading
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS
