Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on December 22, 2025 | 17 Comments
I said my next post would cover my discussions with Tom Murphy, but I’m afraid time has caught up with me and I’m going to sign off for the year with this more general offering involving snippets from here and there. I promise that I’ll get to the Tom Murphy discussion early next year. There have been a few other promised posts I’m yet to deliver on too. I’m feeling the stress of next year’s blogging already.
Ah well, I did manage to put out twenty-six posts in 2025 (or a round twenty-five if you exclude Eric F’s guest post). The most commented on, at 134 comments, was Words and Worship, a twisty tale of nationalism, media, kings and religion. The least commented on, at six comments, was the preorder information for my book – no doubt occasioned by the fact that everyone had rushed out to bag themselves a copy.
Oh, that’s another thing I did this year. Wrote most of a book and published it, thanks to my friends at Chelsea Green. Responses to it so far have been mostly positive. I’ll put a few posts out about it next year. It feels like I’ve been marking time a little on this blog this year, but it’s hard to write a book, run a blog and try to do some farming too. I need to raise my game on the latter front next year, which may slow the pace of blogging, but I’ll try to offer some nuggets here as best I can.
What else to talk about? Well, I recently watched Dave Borlace’s YouTube video about the National Emergency Briefing in London, involving a bunch of experts basically scaring the hell out of us about climate change and demanding that it gets proper media attention and political action. Amen to that, although I found some of the presentations disappointingly confident that staving the emergency off while retaining business-as-usual is all in the bag if we just pull our finger out – a matter of renewable energy, EVs and plant-based diets. Perhaps we need another national emergency briefing to brief the national emergency briefers that far more radical change than that is needed.
Another thing that could do with proper media attention and political action is the corporate corruption of science. One recent example that was (not much) in the news: a heavily-cited study in a peer-reviewed academic journal that claimed the herbicide glyphosate was safe for humans was retracted after it turned out that its authors had been paid by the herbicide’s manufacturer Monsanto, and that Monsanto staff had partly ghostwritten the paper.
I used to write a bit about GMOs but for the most part I’ve stopped, partly because I got bored with the hectoring from biotech trolls (there’s a link between glyphosate and GMOs which I won’t elaborate here). I remember one such character crowing about the retraction of the Séralini study that had suggested health risks with glyphosate. He wrote something along the lines that “finally, there’s now no longer any study in the academic literature that shows any health risks for GMOs” and I remember thinking at the time that having the biotech industry crawling all over every such study made that rather self-fulfilling – a clear case of bias in both the technical and everyday sense. As food campaigner Pat Thomas wrote in response to the glyphosate retraction “Good…but also I’ve watched colleagues be attacked, and even lose their jobs for trying to shine a light on the scientists for hire behind glyphosate “safety” claims. Count all the ways fake corporate science ruins lives.”
I can’t say I’ve ever lost my job for trying to shine a light on dodgy scientific claims, though I suppose that’s unlikely to happen when you’re a self-employed writer and smallholder. Still, I felt a few chill winds when I published my critique of the erroneous figures and corporate-friendly spin in high-profile journalist George Monbiot’s food book Regenesis.
I’ve ended this year revisiting my disagreements with George – a revised and expanded analysis of my previous post discussing his Jeff Bezos-funded adventures geared around verifying financial markets in soil carbon has just been published on Resilience. As outlined in that piece, I’m at a loss to know how to push back against food ecomodernism. Get into the technical details, like George’s dodgy energy figures for bacterial protein powder, and people glaze over. Try to tell a different story of how we might live, or might have to live, and you get likened to a Nazi or a cottagecore fantasist.
I think there’s a lack of integrity on George’s part for not – to my knowledge – recanting his demonstrably erroneous figures, but maybe that’s my naivety. Not many people really care about plain facts, even when they set out their stall otherwise. A recent article about a journalistic titan of an earlier era, Walter Lippman, describes the argument of his 1922 book Public Opinion thus:
modern man responds not to accuracy but to the power of public fiction, not to real environments but to the invented ones that large numbers of people agree on, common prejudices that become ‘their interior representations of the world’
I guess that’s it. People are great at inventing ‘public fictions’ together through devices like language and money. Eventually these fictions usually collide with ‘real environments’. We find that we can’t feed the world with bacterial protein powder, or that present levels of fossil-fuelled urbanism were never sustainable in the long run. But for now the public fictions hold firm. Alas, this makes the eventual reckoning with real environments all the more disastrous when they come.
Another reckoning with hard reality – the war in Ukraine. A lot of us discuss it from a distance on this blog and rehearse our various geopolitical ideas. I got an angry comment from a Ukrainian reader about some remarks in the comments under my last post. I didn’t publish it because it didn’t meet my moderation standards, and the commenter was unwilling to revise it, although I did have a positive email exchange with them. A reminder for us all, perhaps, that some people have more skin in the game on topics discussed here.
Talking of skin in the game Mick, a friend, has recently been sentenced to twenty-six months in jail plus hefty costs for his part in climate change protesting, with evidence for his defence in respect of climate change ruled inadmissible in court. In my much more minor brush with the powers that be for climate protesting I was cut off by the magistrates when I spoke about climate change. I’m not a big fan of prison for anybody except the seriously dangerous, and I believe that people charged with an offence should be able to say what they like in their defence and have it considered, but there we have it. Mick’s a good man with real integrity who’s worked hard for the local community here. I’ll be sparing a thought and raising a glass for him while I’m enjoying my family Christmas. Likewise for the Palestine Action hunger strikers putting themselves on the line – one more grisly episode in a horrific litany of them for which Western governments including Britain’s bear a lot of responsibility.
Anyway, talking of Christmas, that’s it from me for the year. I’m going to be offline from now through until early in 2026. Maybe I’ll see you at the Oxford Real Farming Conference on 8 January, where I’ll be signing books and talking about Finding Lights… with my editor Muna and my wife Cordelia.
Meanwhile, many thanks to everyone who comments here and makes this blog a living entity. There have been some really excellent comments here this year that have obviously involved a lot of time and effort. I’m sorry that I can’t always find the time to respond as fully as I’d like, but I very much appreciate them. I’m looking forward to new conversations next year. If you’ve got any thoughts on topics to cover or different ways of doing things on this blog feel free to use the suggestion box below. For now, here’s wishing you health, happiness and spiritual rejuvenation on this wounded earth.
Paul Kingsnorth Against the Machine
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie The French Peasantry 1450-1660
Henrik Meinander A History of Finland
John Tutino The Mexican Heartland
Jan de Vries The Industrious Revolution
Also, I found this article interesting – any thoughts?
It’s a pretty white male list in all honesty. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with white men as such, but diversification suggestions welcome…
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I’m sorry to read that Mick has been sentenced to prison time.
Some readers here may be interested in the work of the Solidarity Apothecary and in particular a book called The Prisoner’s Herbal, by Nicole Rose, who has herself spent time in prison for protest work.
Interesting article on peak conventional oil and financialisation, but I’m not sure that the opportunistic financialisation/cannibalisation described is so directly caused by the increased cost of energy acquisition, rather than just being a general by-product of financial instability in general. The ultra rich can always afford to buy the dip, we have seen this before. I suppose my issue is that the article doesn’t really explain why we chose cannibalisation rather than accepting a lower standard of living. Or “we”, anyway: my own standard of living is certainly lower than that of my parents, and I don’t recall choosing neoliberal cannibalisation, so despite my relative privilege (I don’t live in a war zone yet, I have a roof over my head and a pantry full of food and a very nice bicycle, and so on), I’m starting to get weary of being scolded about the choices “we” have made, as if growing even more of my own food and using the heating less would somehow fix everything. It probably wasn’t meant to come across quite like that, but the issue of how to best hold to account the people who really do hold and wield power is something I have been thinking about recently.
Thanks as always for all of your writing.
Book suggestion: “Overcoming Exploitation & Externalisation” by Freiderike Haberman. She’s still white but at least she isn’t male 🙂
https://www.routledge.com/Overcoming-Exploitation-and-Externalisation-An-Intersectional-Theory-of-Hegemony-and-Transformation/Habermann/p/book/9781032446813
In respect of the linked article, Trump’s recent theft of several hundred million dollars of oil from Venezuela and increasing overtures of capture of Greenland backs up Newbury’s theory: the US really needs more oil.
https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2025/12/23/panama-confirms-u-s-seized-oil-tanker-violated-countrys-flagging-rules/
Just a bit of news about oil tanker
Happy Christmas Chris and family.
A suggestion to add to your reading list.
Luke Kemp’s “Goliaths Curse”.
Roughly an analysis of civilization as entrapment and the curses that leads to there eventual collapse. Gives a screed at the end that we must reform our current Global Goliath, but I prefer collapse, as not being dominated is a lot healthier, though getting through the collapse bottleneck is another matter.
I have James Scott’s “The art of not being governed” for my holiday reading.
I’m pretty sure that this quote came from Goliath’s Curse. My trouble is that whatever I read just dumps into some kind of murky memory pool and I’m never quite sure afterward. But I second your recommendation:
“…state formation and collapse are best understood as a criminal enterprise being established and then broken apart by infighting or pressure from competitor rackets.”
Luke Kemp is well-read and has an interdisciplinary focus. He probably got it from Charles Tilly in War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.
James C Scott published with the title of “The art of not being Governed” in 2009, long before Luke Kemp published “Goliaths Curse” in 2025.
James C Scott states in the preface to his book that he got the title from Jimmy Casas Klausen, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who taught a course in political philosophy titled The Art of Not Being Governed, who graciously agreed to the title being used for James C Scott’s book. This not me demonstrating great memory, but having read the preface this morning, as I have set Mr Scott’s work as my Christmas read. Very good so far. Luke Kemp has taken the concepts of caged lands, lootable resources, and prehistoric egalitarian societies from Scott’s work (Scott states none of the ideas he uses are original to himself, and I am sure Luke Kemp would have read some of Scott’s original sources), he added the idea of monopolisable weapons and Goliaths curses: elite competition, over extraction from the masses, famine, plagues and the dark triad. Kemp maps these ideas on to pre-Columbian America’s and the ancient middle east. Scott and Kemp’s books have different subjects, Kemps about civilizations, how they sustain themselves (not by being nice!) and how they fail. Scott’s is about the last large unenclosed area of earth and how the people’s there have avoided until recently being governed by the states they are nominally part off, and they have very good reasons to avoid so.
What I was referring to was, “state formation and collapse are best understood as a criminal enterprise.” Eric F. couldn’t remember where he heard this and thought it might be Kemp. Tilly seems to be the original source. Charles Tilly’s essay was titled War Making and State Making as Organized Crime and appeared in Bringing the State Back In (1985, Evans & Reuschemeyer, editors). Charles Tilly was an eminent sociologist and is sometimes credited as the “founding father of 21st-century sociology.” He was at the University of Michigan from 1969-1984 and so would have come into contact with Marshall Sahlins and just missed Elman Service at Ann Arbor. He died in 2008. If anyone is interested in Tilly’s essay, here is al link to a website that provides a PDF copy.
https://davidlabaree.com/2025/06/05/the-state-as-organized-crime-3/
It is fashionable nowadays to default to the integrative theory of state formation instead of conflict theory. Joseph Tainter goes into both theories in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). Tainter gives partial credit to both theories but comes down predominantly on the side of integrative theory. This is simply that bureaucracies arise because they provide greater integration of resources into society. Controlling land and irrigation to improve grain yields in Sumer, for example. Conflict theory is simply that the elites snookered all of us early on. I myself hold a contrary view to Tainter, in that both theories have merit but I come down predominately on the side of conflict theory. The idea of the state as organized crime is squarely in the conflict theory camp. In my long-time analysis of the state as a bad thing, it is convenient to typify it as an institutionalized version of criminal gangs. But – and this is important – the real culprit is not assholes who abuse their power, like Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron. The real culprits are the institutions of state power, like the law itself and the police power that enforces the law at the point of a gun, the baton and the locked prison door.
@Walter,
Yes, you are quite correct that the regime could not function in an organized way without its many enforcers and functionaries.
I must preface this next by saying that I’m a white middle class man, so I recognize that I get special treatment.
But – the majority of the enforcers and functionaries are at such a low level that they do what they do simply because it’s a job. Surely many of them would happily jump at the chance to be the crime boss, but so would many janitors or insurance agents or grocers.
Of course “Just following orders…” is not a defense, but still, I see the problem not in the choices of the individuals who make bad career decisions, and especially not the individuals who don’t have any good options. But instead I see the core problem to be the overarching narrative that tells us that resources are scarce and the only way is to take them for ourselves. Without this narrative, it would be glaringly obvious that the king is nothing but a criminal.
And now that the narrative of greed is so pervasive, it is almost impossible to build a stable community around generosity.
I met a nice man last night who had a well-paid and satisfying career engineering the F-35 fighter jet for Lockheed-Martin. He showed no sense of irony that it was an over-priced boondoggle that doesn’t operate to specifications. Though I’m actually happy that the F-35 is an expensive disaster, because it can only hasten on the collapse of the US empire.
I’m also happy that I discovered early enough that I didn’t need to make so much money that I’d be required to do that kind of job for the empire. Surprisingly few people have even that minimal level of imagination to arrive at such a notion.
Well Eric, I am going to call “Bullshit!” on your rationale that the thugs with badges (the police) are just “victims” of an oppressive system. And the same for your story about the “nice man who had a well-paid and satisfying career engineering the F-35 fighter jet for Lockheed-Martin,” who “showed no sense of irony that it was an over-priced boondoggle that doesn’t operate to specifications.”
I am not going to mince words here. Get a grip and take responsibility for your role in keeping the System alive. The only way out – that I know of – is to not play a part in the System. One has to prostitute themselves to keep a roof over one’s head and food on the table. But you DO NOT have to buy the lie. Further, if you have a conscience, you should not put yourself into a position where you have to enforce the law against innocent pot smokers, Palestine Action protesters, unwed mothers seeking abortions, etc., etc., etc. As an anecdote, I had a good friend in 1969 who was pressured to join the police because he came from a long line of Irish cops. He quit when he realized he might be forced to beat in the heads of some of his friends on the front lines of demonstrations against the War.
For all those who believe that the New Testament has some credibility, whether as myth or divine truth, Pontius Pilate is a metaphor for what I am talking about. His great sin was not that he condemned Jesus, but that he washed his hands of responsibility.
By the way, I have spent over fifty-five years of trying to make change and standing up against the greatest superpower in the history of the world. I am going to sign off and work on my health problems. Bye.
@Walter,
I wish you well and hope you make progress with your health issues.
Regarding the integrative state vs the conflict or criminal state:
If one comes down on the side of the nature of the state as integrative, participation in civic life can be seen as being virtuous, being a good person contributing to the greater good. If one sees the state as a criminal enterprise, any kind of participation makes one a coconspirator in crime.
But this kind of dualism seems a little too pat; surely all states are a mixture of both. If we want to nudge the state toward the more integrative role, lawful participation is the probably the best way to do it.
If one sees government and its activities as predominantly criminal, and if the balance of any participation is seen as contributing to that criminality, the only way to continue being virtuous is to leave the state entirely.
Becoming and living as a stateless person or not paying or receiving tax money or not engaging in any kind of civic or economic participation is extremely difficult to do. I dare say that leaving the US and moving to France is no solution either. France is surely as much a “criminal” state as the US.
Perhaps there are pockets of moderate statelessness around the world, such as the interior Amazon or Congo basins, but as things stand now, every square inch of land surface is controlled by one state or another. States are hard to avoid.
In the end, I think we can arrange our lives to do less harm and at the same time nudge our states toward becoming less harmful. But do need to prepare for the day that modern states disappear; they can’t last much longer. Perhaps then we will find out whether that disappearance will cause us to rejoice (or despair). In either case, the transition from being a citizenof a state to statelessness is going to be hard.
A few years ago I was in our local brewpub in Ferndale, Washington and a fellow I was talking to asked me about Paul Krugman (famous economist who still writes a column for the New York Times). I told him Krugman was too rightwing for me. He literally spit out his beer. I could probably get the same response from the present set of people I hang around with if I said The Guardian is too rightwing for me. It is not surprising that George Monbiot still writes for the “sorta socialist rag from Fleet Street.” The thing that kinda bothers me is that Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) still gives George Monbiot some credibility and has him on her show once in awhile.
Personally, I am not worried about the corruption of science. I do my research and apply the results. But I am doing this so people will have food to eat after environmental overshoot results in dieoff. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist and applied his research too. But he applied it to evil purposes. He should have seen where it would lead and so bears the blame. I am certainly willing to bear the blame of growing new landraces in the “supposedly” evil field of agriculture (per Tom Murphy). Science always has corruption as part of its research program and its funding. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Watched the Oppenheimer film a couple of nights back. He knew perfectly well what his research would lead too. He just thought he could talk sense into the political class of the US. He was naive. Give a man ape a weapon no other man ape posses and not expect him to make himself king of the jungle? To use a metaphor. In the early days of science there was little corruption. A lot of the big advances were achieved by obscure scientist on minimal budgets ( though some did achieve fame for their discoveries, but rarely wealthy) This was usually basic research, often not directly monetisable. Today the majority of research is explicitly directed at making money. It is either corporate, or corporate money paying a university department, and their is a lot of money. An old rule is where there is a lot of money, you will find a lot of corruption. This is not helped by having a hugely inflated university sector, which will take money from anyone to keep itself inflated, and it’s senior staffs salaries fat. The university sector needs gutting, and what’s left turned into trade schools for the professions. The basic research has been done, most of it a century past, let the corporation pay for their pet engineers and own their results. Too many people are hanging onto a myth of science that is a century out of date.
Here’s a thought experiment:
By chance, one of the 71 billionnaires in London picks up a lightly used copy of Small Farm Future that was left by a groundskeeper at the Queenwood golf club. He actually starts reading and is intrigued enough to finish the book.
A few days later he contacts the author, Chris Smaje, and proposes a demonstration project that would move 100 willing, but poor, families out of their London flats to small farms of their own somewhere in the UK.
But before the project can begin, he asks for a budget. He doesn’t expect any financial return or management help (he knows Chris is a busy man with other projects of his own), he just wants to know what his philanthropy will cost, including everything needed to situate each family for sustainable subsistence living. He is completely flexible regarding land tenure and housing options as long as costs per family are minimized/optimized.
What would make up the list of major budget line items? What would be the total project cost?
Thanks for the comments, good wishes and reading suggestions. Luke Kemp has been on my radar, but not Friederike Haberman. More reading to do!
Perhaps we can come back to the Steven Newbury article sometime.
Great thought experiment from Joe. I’ve been involved in some experiments somewhat along these lines, a tale that I may tell here sometime. Meanwhile I’d love to develop a conversation on this blog about the costs and budget line items as suggested by Joe. Another theme for next year. But signing off now for a couple of weeks – happy holidays everyone.
Okay. Here’s my two centimes on the thought experiment proposed by Joe. I have thought a lot about this over the years. Fifteen years ago I was contacted by someone down in Los Angeles, California that supposedly had the money and wanted my input on how to do something like this. I sent him some projections and an overall cost estimate but nothing ever came of it. As with most venture capitalists and philanthropists, he probably wanted maximum publicity on the cheap. I was also put in touch with the Lummi Tribe at the same time and they wanted to do some community gardens on the rez. (We lived about three miles from the Lummis.) I gave them some projections and they hired someone else to do the job. He failed spectacularly, so they contacted me a year later. I gave them the same projections and a $10,000 demand to get started, which was less than they had already spent for no results. They never followed through either. Back when I had 5 acres to play with, I could have set up four plots of an acre each on my land and I could have done the primary soil prep with my BCS tiller. There were already markets for the prospective farmers to sell their produce within 25 miles – two of which I had started myself in Ferndale and Lynden. No interest. So, if someone really, really, really wants to fund something like this, here are some budget projections. All costs are measured in US dollars. Do your own conversions to sterling or euros per your own frame of reference.
Land – assumed to be already in hand, so $0 for land, taxes, etc. Land is also assumed to be tillable.
Land per family – 1 acre (.4 hectare) per family. This figure comes from my own experience that a person can comfortably work an acre in a 3000-hour year with mostly hand labor plus 5-10 gallons of gasoline for a tiller and a weed-whacker (strimmer). Long days in the summer, short days in the winter. A 3000-hour year includes all manual labor, plus transport time, plus time at the market, plus spreadsheet time. 3000 hours is 1.5 FTE (full-time equivalent = 2000 hours for a 52-week/year, 40-hour/week full-time job minus 2 weeks for vacation.
Working families – assumption is 2 FTE so the available hours jumps up to 6000 for two people on one acre. This is a built-in conservative estimate that accounts for the learning curve, even among motivated newbies. If you put 2 working adults on 2 acres, you risk catastrophic burnout. Keep in mind that the adults are likely to have at least one small child so it is good to build in a buffer for that reason too.
Crop costs per acre – $3000 for seed, fertilizer, tiller gas, market stall fees, and minimal advertising. This should generate $30,000 in food value per acre. These are NOT made-up numbers! They are based on my previous business as a market gardener.
Subsidized income per family – $40,000. This may seem low, but consider that a motivating factor will be allowing the family to keep its net income from the markets it goes to, plus any income from a CSA box scheme, selling to restaurants, farm stands, etc.
Mentor/motivator/gatekeeper – You will need an experienced farmer for each 10 families who can help them in the field, in the classroom with spreadsheets and crop/soil science, at the markets, and generally hold their hands. $60,000 would be the salary for this person for a year. Expect this person to spend 3000 hours per year on his/her 10 families. That is still only $20 per hour.
Start-up costs – Each 10 families will require a new walk-behind tiller that is reliable. This will be around $4000-5000 per tiller. A large truck will be required for each 10 families to get fill dirt, compost, building materials, deliver produce to restaurants and farmers markets, etc. This cost should be a minimum of $30,000 per 10 families. It is assumed that each family will have at least 1 vehicle that they can drive to the market on market days. Fertilizer and seed costs are mentioned previously in crop costs.
Housing – People will have to provide their own housing. Deposits and first/last month’s rent can be paid out of the large amount of startup capital and then amortized over the first year. If the funder of the whole scheme wants to build housing for workers, that is a whole ‘nother aspect and a whole new set of assumptions will be in play.
Minimum startup costs for 100 families.
$3000 crop costs x 100 = $300,000
$40,000 per family subsidized salary = $4 million
$60,000 per mentor/gatekeeper x 10 = $600,000
$5000 per tiller x 10 = $50,000
$30,000 truck x 10 = $300,000
Total costs for first year = $5.25 million. This is assuming the land is already available and is tillable.
$30,000 food value generated per acre for 100 families on 100 acres = $3 million
Losses = $2.25 million or $22,500 per acre. This is in the first year. Do you see why farmers are more than willing to cut corners and fall for “cheap fixes?” Do you see why bankers have their thumb on the farmer year-round?
Notice that the costs in the second year will be reduced. Also note that the publicity benefit for the benefactor will likely far exceed $2.25 million in added share value on his/her stock portfolio. A case in point is Bill Gates, who made far more money on his Microsoft shares once he started his philanthropic endeavors. Before philanthropy he was a multi-millionaire. After his philanthropy started, he became a multi-billionaire. That is why Jeff Bezos is giving money to George Monbiot’s project. He gets far more than he puts in just in public acclaim, burnishing his image, and distracting people from the harsh working conditions at Amazon warehouses.
These numbers and the inevitable loss of money should be familiar to anyone who tried starting a business growing food
Added thoughts:
Hand tools per family are a microscopic number and can easily be taken out of the crop cost per acre. Irrigation costs are something to consider also. My irrigation costs were minimal because we had our own well. Now I take water out of the stream at the bottom of our property. Some of the farmers who asked me for advice in Whatcom County years ago had severe irrigation problems. One group didn’t understand the lower flows with drip irrigation and kept their water on too long each day. Another admitted that he kept himself in a hole for years because he was too cheap to put in an irrigation system on rented land. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that any price you pay your mentor/gatekeepers will be worth it.
If anyone knows of a rich guy who wants to fund something like this, let me know. You will actually have to show up in southern France if you want my help, of course. But if you know Brad Pitt, he doesn’t live too far away and could afford to drive over for a lunch-time planning session.
Per Joe’s original post, if you did not pay the families a subsidized salary and had them build their own housing on your land given to you by the king, they could generate 3 million for a cost of 1.25 million. See how this feudalism stuff worked?