The Small Farm Future Blog

A spring tweet

Posted on March 10, 2013 | No Comments

Exciting news: I’m now tweeting my blogs. If someone had told me last March that I’d tweet my blogs in a year’s time, I wouldn’t have believed them, and the March before that I’d have contacted my doctor to ask if he could offer prophylaxis. Such is progress – which brings me to the topic of farming, technology and progress. But hold your horses, that’s for next week (oh all right, here’s a taster). Anyway, I’ll tweet you about it.

My id, for the twitterati amongst you, is @csmaje since unfortunately @smallfarmfuture is already taken by some Welsh smallholders, and all the best to them. But by a remarkable coincidence it turns out that everybody in the Small Farm Future office – from myself as editor-in-chief, to the staff writers, production team, technical support, estates and buildings and even the tea boy – just happens to be called Chris Smaje, so maybe it’s not such a bad id after all.

Also being announced via Twitter is a new series of articles by yours truly on the topic of social science statistics, which is being published on the website Statistics Views. You can see my first article here. The articles aren’t specifically about food and farming issues, but I’m hoping that some of them will be. The cardinal difference between my Statistics Views articles and the ones here on Small Farm Future is that I get paid for the former, so do please forgive me if my posts on here get lower priority from time to time. If you’d like to rectify that, please send cheques to me at Small Farm Future, Dream On Boulevard, Never Never Land. Thank you.

Pressure of work, including the onset of the new growing season, is such that my posts may get a bit more peremptory over the coming months, but I still have some good things coming up – with posts on agricultural technology, agrarian populism, golden rice (again), wheat, planning permission (again), Via Campesina, perennial grains, tackling hunger, global commons (again), more thoughts on grass, anything that the new growing season throws up and a topic dear to many men’s hearts, does size really matter? So please do keep reading.

As a small taster for some of these forthcoming posts, here are a few interesting links: The World Bank has a new report out arguing that African governments need to open up to agribusiness instead of allowing themselves to be overrun by all those pesky smallholders. In other words, the World Bank’s new report is a lot like many of the World Bank’s old reports, bless. But those pesky smallholders somehow keep on farming. Some more nuanced and conflicted perspectives on global agriculture, poverty and smallholder farming emerged at a conference on food security organised by The Economist.  But not nuanced enough for Robin Bourgeois of GFAR, whose thoughtful post makes the case for taking smallholder farmers more seriously (eg. by thinking to actually invite some of them to conferences about smallholder farmers), and for not assuming that the planet can sustain demand-led resource use at US or EU levels. Amen to that. I’ve got Gordon Conway’s book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World in my in tray, and I’m looking forward to reading it and posting more on this topic soon. But next week: farming, technology and the Amish.

Oh, and talking of spring tweets, we had a great wildlife walk at Vallis Veg yesterday with the folks from the Somerset wildlife trust – with skylarks and lapwings above, chaffinches and great tits twittering (properly) in the hedges, and barn owl feathers, shrews, badger footprints and other offerings from the foxes and the badgers to keep the kids amused. Keep an eye on our events page over at Vallis Veg for future dates if you’re local.