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 April 22, 2026 | 67 Comments
Apologies that I’m not finding much time at the moment to write new blog posts, a situation that will probably continue for a while. Well, here’s one anyway, chiselled out from a couple of hours of idling on the internet recently and trying to catch up on world news by triangulating rather unoriginally between the BBC, Al Jazeera, the London Review of Books and The Guardian. And if triangulating between four sources sounds odd, believe me it’s not as odd as some of the things in the news they’re reporting on.
Here, I’m going to make reference to one particular columnist from the last of these outlets – a familiar antagonist of mine who I’m a bit loth to bring up again. It’s not so much that I want to renew public hostilities as that his articles capture a certain sense of the moment that I’m minded to share with regular readers here in the hope of getting some feedback on your own thoughts about the current state of play. At the expense of awkward phrasing I’m not going to mention him by name, because the polemical to-and-fro is a bit boring. It’s the underlying issues that are important.
The first of his articles concerns food, involving a well-founded fear of food system collapse and an appropriate, if familiar, critique of the corporate players who bear major responsibility for its present malaise. In response to this he writes,
“We know what needs to happen: break up the big corporations; bring the system under proper regulatory control; diversify our diets and their means of production; reduce our dependence on a handful of major exporting countries; build strategic food reserves, accessible to people everywhere.”
The hyperlinks take us first to a research paper suggesting various substitutes for wheat flour in ‘developing’ countries, mostly involving other flours from tropical plants. And then to the author’s own 2022 column heralding bacterial protein powder, which we now know has an extraordinarily high cost in electrical energy (see here for more background on this issue). Our author should know this too, since I wrote to him pointing it out. Furthermore, it’s a constraint that can’t ever really be overcome.
These are both at best esoteric ways of improving the resilience of the food system. The other suggestions in the cited paragraph make more sense – especially breaking up corporations, reducing import dependence and building food reserves accessible to everyone. A good way of doing that, I’d argue, would be distributist land reform and the creation of local small farm economies that give everyone the chance to build their own accessible food reserves by farming for themselves. But our author has rejected such possibilities rather forcefully.
Our author goes on to observe, rightly, that governments are beholden to corporate and financial power and are therefore unlikely to tackle the fragility of the existing food system. You might think this would lead into a discussion of hyper-complexity and collapse of the kind that feature regularly on this site. Instead we get the hope only that the braver politicians will protect us from the worst of impacts, providing the lead-in to the article’s concluding section and its big idea – a shift to plant-based diets. Well, it’d probably help, just as putting your weekly recycling out probably helps. But I get the sense of someone who’s boxed himself into a corner through his repeated scorn for agroecological politics and through his intimations of systemic collapse that he can’t actually bring himself to take seriously for fear of not being taken seriously in the rarefied political circles he moves in. This pretty much seems to be the state of play in our political culture. Full steam ahead and no insubordination, despite the all-too-visible iceberg that’s looming.
Hang on, though. Maybe I’ve got this all wrong, and help is at hand in the form of “vast, cascading shifts in energy supply and storage” favouring low-carbon renewables.
Here in the UK, you wouldn’t think so on the face of it, given that the war with Iran has highlighted the dependence of our electricity supply (and price) on gas. But, as this article by our author explains, this high price is an artefact of marginal cost pricing, in which the supply of last resort (gas) sets the price for the rest of the electricity in the supply stack. He’s right to criticise the fossil fuel ultras who use this to argue the case for more gas, but he never really gets to grips with the complexities of how to deal with the problem, which are laid out more clearly here. I’d be interested in any comments on this latter article.
But going back to our author’s original article, it prompted three concerns on my part. First, implicit in it is a concern for the high cost of domestic energy bills in their impact on poor people. There are parallels with the concern about the impact of higher food prices on poor people, which our author doesn’t understand well. Energy is a bit different, since unlike food it’s not a labour-intensive, low-paid sector. Nevertheless, I think there’s a potential evasiveness here. In pointing the finger at fossil energy as the source of high domestic bills, it’s easy to shift blame onto the usual corporate baddies for the plight of the poor. But the real problem is poverty itself, and the unequal distribution of income and wealth. It’s not just the fossil energy companies that need to take a hit. We richer folk, the kind apt to be reading articles like this in The Guardian, probably need to be poorer too. The best amelioration for poverty isn’t cheap food or energy, but a fairer share of resources.
The second problem is the one known as energy cannibalism, which is the other side of the coin to marginal cost pricing and the high cost of energy due to gas as the final or marginal supplier in the stack. This creates a situation which is bad for energy consumers but good for renewable energy suppliers, who get paid over the odds for their product. As renewables assume a greater share of supply, so the unit price decreases, making renewables a less attractive investment option. Solving this is not all that straightforward. Especially because, as Brett Christophers shows in detail in his book The Price Is Wrong, electricity pricing is a complex field, and the typical easy answers reached for on the left – cut out fossil energy, tax it, nationalise everything etc – don’t really cut it. Ultimately, Britain might have to nationalise China to make this work, and possibly not even then. It did essentially do that a couple of hundred years ago with a degree of success, but I suspect it wouldn’t work so well if it tried again now.
Stop press: it looks like the government is planning to limit the benefits of marginal cost pricing to renewable suppliers, which could hasten the experiment with energy cannibalism.
All this points to the third problem. There are a series of real-world issues underlying all this like the variability of renewable supply, the difficulties of storing electrical energy, the costs of grids and electrification, the difficulties of hard-to-electrify industrial sectors and so on which don’t really go away just by being angry with the rich and powerful. Meanwhile, the continuation of civilization-as-we-know-it but with less impact on Earth systems depends on ever greater low-carbon electricity for vehicles, data centres, industry, domestic heating and cooling, even for food production if you accept the case for bacterial protein. Governments fiddle ineffectually around the edges of this, as they’ve long done in the food and farming system, with various fiscal carrots and sticks. I find it increasingly hard to take it seriously as the iceberg fills ever more of the horizon.
Hang on again, though. Maybe I’m wrong, again. In this article our author heralds solutions to at least one of those problems – the difficulties of storing electrical energy. If we had cheap, grid-scale battery storage, then things could look rosier. According to this article by Bill McKibben that he cites, California’s grid-scale battery systems recently stepped in to prolong the renewable energy component in its supply by a few hours. Job done. Almost.
Here’s where it gets a bit uncomfortable being a sceptic of the craze for a transition to what Jeff McFadden calls renoobles. I’d genuinely like humanity to be able to transition rapidly out of fossils while preventing the world as we know it from falling apart chaotically. But at this stage of the game, a few hours of battery-stored renoobles in one of the richest parts of the world seems too little too late. For this to work, there would need to be an almost unimaginably massive technology transfer from the rich to the poor countries, which still rely overwhelmingly on fossil-generated electricity. But we seem to prefer military adventurism instead. And even if we succeeded, we’d still have a high-energy, high-tech, high-impact, resource extractive world that was busting its limits in numerous other ways.
So I’d suggest redeploying most of the technical expertise involved in renewables, bacterial food and so on into instead easing the bumpy landing into a lower-energy more localized world that seems likely to be our lot despite all the clever tech and journalistic boosterism to the contrary.
Finally, shifting gear somewhat, while I suppose I’m still in some sense broadly of the left – and also in some other sense broadly a smalltown and small c conservative – writing this piece has somewhat sharpened my disillusionment with much that passes for radical writing currently. So too did this piece by Nancy Fraser about Jurgen Habermas in the London Review of Books, albeit that I have more time for her than for firebrand radical journalists who paradoxically connive at the status quo.
As a onetime academic sociologist I used to write a bit like Fraser does (some might say I still do). At least I still pretty much understand what she’s saying. But I find it rather contradictory and problematic. We have to ‘historicise’ the way capitalist society works, but also ‘problematise’ it – implying some firm ground of judgment to stand on, which Fraser seems to find only among oppressed people (‘subalterns’) and not in wider ‘normative foundations’ or human possibilities. I do think there’s a ‘who feels it knows it’ aspect to the life experiences of those who are marginalised and oppressed, but I’m not convinced it necessarily leads to a generally emancipatory politics, nor provides firm normative grounds for ‘problematising’ capitalism in the first place. For some years, I’ve been toying with natural law ideas and their ‘historicisation’ – as for example in the hands of Alisdair MacIntyre, who ultimately rejected the contradictions of Marxism in favour of a more inclusive and spiritual account. Fraser’s article underlines for me why that shift makes sense.
Another frustrating aspect of Fraser’s piece is the cancel culture element – with Habermas’s stance on Gaza, the light he cast “seemed to go out”. Well, I don’t agree with the stance he took on Gaza and I’ve played this ‘who’s hot and who’s not’ game that disfigures so much leftist thought myself, but I’m tired of it. You can disagree with someone without thinking their lights are out, although that’s now the case biologically with Prof Habermas. RIP.
And so ends this blog post. It may be a wee while before the next one, but I hope to get back to blogging about Finding Lights… as soon as I can.
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Great article thank you. I was looking for a sage view of the current turmoil during breakfast and found this shortly afterwards..
On the not unrelated topic of the National Emergency Briefing, I remember you mentioning a thought that the speakers needed their own briefing. Not sure if you’re under the skin of the views of this former oil man, (one of the NEB fronters) but wonder if you might think he is slightly more in tune than you fear the gang are in general. https://climateunfucked.substack.com/p/scientist-explains-the-inequality
Talking of former oil men. He who must not be named might like to read these three posts from Nate Hagens giving a bit of detail behind the degree to which our current world is locked into oil https://natehagens.substack.com/p/essay-oil-101-what-you-actually-need. (Talking about Nate, it’s interesting to note that he has given up his mission of explaining and describing our collapsing system and is now devoted to talking about how to build the new one.
(Hopefully both of these characters will soon join our rogues gallery of former fossil fuel professionals who have turned to the light in various ways https://lifeafteroil.net/)
PS: A plug for Goliath’s Curse, I suspect blog followers will find many aspects help with their triangulations.
In a world of nearly 10 billion people, scale is everything, but also one of the most overlooked limiting factors when it comes to technological solutions to the poly-crisis. Great many technologies that are viable at small scale simply do not scale gracefully, and great many, even well educated people, have real difficulties with thinking at scale. This is true of the hightly distributed renewable generation, which simply doesn’t scale well enough in terms of material density / costs (impossible volumes of copper, steel, cement, etc.) and electricity storage poor energy density (translating into huge volumes and weight). Shifting to renewables for the majority of our energy demand is a good thing in principle, but without dramatic degrowth of our energy demand it’s a pipe dream. To some extent this will take care of itself, when something can’t be done, it can’t be done, but there is an additional cost that this comes with, the change in land use that is going to be hard to reverse in the future, and in the present skews land prices. Here in Scotland, between renewables, rewilding and carbon offsetting, land has become unafordable not just for the ‘poor’ but even for the moderately afluent home owning Scots (the proliferation of English regional accents in the Highlands is a symptom of this, the buying power in the UK being greater the further south one lives). This is the weak point of the small farm present, and for it to scale into a small farm future gracefully would require a radical land reform. Without degrowth and land reform, I can’t see there is a viable pathway forward. Of course, in many ways, the Guardian demographic has most to lose from radical degrowth, so I don’t expect the Guardian columnist(s) to be that keen on it.
I sometimes talk about what I call diseconomies of scale — situations where scaling up actually uses more resources per unit of production, or introduces other barriers.
If the only metric you have for measuring resources is money, then something like cheap fossil fuels will hide a lot of these diseconomies of scale, until the fossil fuels stop being cheap. At that point, many people start to have a very bad time trying to get enough food to feed their families, and some get very rich. And when the fossil fuels get scarce enough there are disruptions to transport, a lot more people start to have a very bad time — file that under “introduces other barriers”.
Of course, getting rid of such hidden diseconomies of scale (by, say, distributist land reform and a shift towards much more small scale local production of food and other goods) doesn’t necessarily mean the problem of famine goes away: it just means it has different causes than a spike in synthetic fertiliser prices. Some of those causes are easier to mitigate than others.
I read an interesting piece on who owns land in the UK, No1 is RSPB , followed by the forestry Commission , the Military comes in at no 3 , crown lands comes in at no 5 , the CofC of E comes in there somewhere , private estates are not in the top ten .
The Gov and its quangoes in one guise or another is the largest landowner .
That sounds more like who owns England, perhaps? As of 2025 80+% of Scotland is privately owned, 50% of that is by just 408 people, the biggest private landowner is a foreign billionaire. Forestry Commission is no.1, NTS no.3, RSPB no. 6., Crown no. 14. See https://andywightman.scot/2026/02/who-owns-scotland-2025/.
Thanks tf, I was also wondering at the numbers there given the amount of Scottish land owned by lairds and so on.
A hell of a lot of Scotland is not farming country , grouse moors, deer parks , sheep and trees is all its good for , scraping a living of it would be tough , if it was possible the landowners would already be growing much more profitable crops than grouse trees and deer .
Without degrowth and land reform, I can’t see there is a viable pathway forward.
Agree entirely, but it’s even worse than that. The degrowth must be more rapid than the ongoing demand for energy (and other resources) to free it up for investing in the land that has been “reformed”. Every person leaving the city must re-build their housing, develop water and energy infrastructure, and invest in the tools and skills required for becoming a small farmer. In times past, these activities and investments were huge generational efforts.
Preparing for this level of effort at scale would be a Sisyphean political task and unlikely to happen. Most people will already be sacrificing much of their affluence (if they have any at all) and won’t want to sacrifice more to allow others to move to the country.
My wife and I left the city when we were in our twenties and spent much of the last 50 years working to raise our children and save enough to invest in gradually improving our land and farm infrastructure. Even though the last 50 years were still on the carbon pulse upslope and relatively good, it’s not been easy.
The carbon pulse downslope may already be starting and it will be even harder when just about everything one needs to start up a farm becomes less and less affordable. The only thing likely to be inexpensive in the future will be manual labor. There will be a huge surplus of it willing to work for food.
It’s going to be bad.
I tend to have a slightly less doomy stance than you do, Joe, but parts of this comment certainly ring true for me.
I haven’t been able to afford land,I’m old enough that even if I were given some land for free, building the infrastructure to live on it and do some farming would be a daunting task, and I am aware that physical goods like gloves and power tools and building materials are cheaper today than they are likely to be for the rest of my life. The ratchet only tightens in one direction.
I’m in the thick of it with regards to doing this now (2nd farm but this time I’m going to own and live on it), so Chris’s current posting schedule suits me just fine. I didn’t have the cash to start in my 20s so I’m a little bit behind you but I did spent that time learning to grow and acquiring hand tools and staying in shape, and even still starting from (almost) scratch is a lot. But there’s not a lot of choices, there’s no more old farm houses to fix up or cheap land anywhere.
To agree with a point Kathryn made earlier though, this would be somewhat easier if I didn’t have to maintain a day job, or try and maintain some high energy aspects of my life like a car just to participate in society.
Politically land reform is probably the only thing that would move the needle. That would at least make the loans people would need to carry for shelter and farm infrastructure more manageable.
The UK imports 60% of its food , that presupposes someone somewhere has food for export and the ability to transport it , there are several problems with that , gas is used to make fertilizer and the price of fertilizer is set by the gas price , I would say that the majority of farmers / corporate farms across the world are cutting the use of fertilizer , its just too expensive .
Diesel . If America a stoped using diesel there would be very little food to export .
Gas . LNG it takes the energy of two gallons of natural gas to make one gallon of LNG , apart from being appallingly waste you are buying three gallons , hence the high price compared to pipelines . Gas is the backup to go to because of its quick start ability , fire up a gas turbine and electricity magically appears ,most gas stations don’t boil water , modified jet engine deliver power almost instantly to spin a generator .
Solar and wind do work but , to run a 1600 foot house living as if you were grid connected here in TX you need somewhere around 12 to 15 kW of supply and at least double that in storage , ( electric car batteries are becoming available and with a little know how can be made to run a system , cannibalizing one battery to fix several others dead and dying cells ) If you live frugally then a couple of kW Will work .
The idea of manufacturing food using energy we have not got , using sunlight instead of what happens naturally just says we are at the end of sanity !
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HN_–h_jJ-E&pp=ugUHEgVlbi1HQtIHCQlPAqO1ajebQw%3D%3D
I did not think that energy was so expensive and tight in the UK they are thinking of throttling back mobile phone use and internet speeds .
Jeff McFadden is a legend, nice to see him cited here!
Nice post!
I recommend checking Isabella Weber’s work on pricing, and energy shocks, she is one of the best economists on this, that understands the complex system dynamics of energy and price shocks, and how an inital price shock can ripple through an economy. The ugliest type of rationing is by price explosions. as creators of the currency and creators of markets governments have the responsibility to regulate them.
Nationalising, regulating prices is also not an all or nothing thing. You can nationalise Gas plants without having to nationalise all solar panels.
She wrote a very good book how China had a dual track price system with ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ prices, where light prices where non essential and market based and heavy prices essential and regulated.
How China Escaped Shock Therapy – I. Weber.
Chris Smaje wrote: “I’d be interested in any comments on this latter article [“Why does gas set the price of electricity – and is there an alternative?”].
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of-electricity-and-is-there-an-alternative/
I think it’s notable that nationalising (to some extent, as mentioned by ChrisH) is absent from the alternatives discussed in that article. The “coupling” of gas prices and electricity prices is obviously happening because substitution is possible on national and international scales, and the producers are charging what the markets will bear, to increase their profits.
If the energy producers were like public utilities instead of profit-hungry corporations, the prices charged could be based on the costs of production without the energy users paying extra towards profit maximization.
Yes, there are steps that could taken to bring electricity prices nearer to their actual costs, nationalisaton infrastructure is one option, or at least drastic intervention through meaningfull price caping, and that should happen.
But the bigger problem is that as long electricity has to be produced using hydrocarbons (which is the case in the UK), electricity costs will continue to be intrinsincly linked to that of hydrocarbons. And as decarbonisation at the end user grows, the dependecy on hydrocarbons at generation point will increase, I recall a recent study showing that in the UK the CO2 reduction from growth in EV adoption is being entirely offset by this already.
Without drastic reduction in energy consumption decarbonisation can only happen with a heavy reliance on nuclear, which is notoriously expensive (the article you linked mentions Spain as a decarbonisation example, but, of course, European grid as a whole benefits greatly from French nuclear). And renewables are not cheap either, not at a small scale, where returns on investment are too long, nor at big scale, where economies of scale will run into material scarcity long before we get close to what is required (I reckon decarbonisation via the renewables route starts only being nominally viable at around 50% energy use cut globally). I think cheap plentiful energy is a Sci-Fi myth — a sensible, rational, government would be focusing on how to reduce energy use as a priority, rather than making energy cheap (and, of course, dramatic reduction in energy demand would result in price reductions).
Unfortunately, reduction in demand triggering a fall in price may only occur in the short term if supply exceeds demand. The low price would then push an increased in demand in a variation on Jeavons paradox. The only way to sustain reduction in demand is to keep prices high by shrinking supply alongside measures to reduce demand.
The deteriorating energy return on energy invested across fossil fuel sectors, and in the future for renewables and nuclear as well, will consistently shrink the availability of energy for the rest of the worlds economy into the future. In other words I think supply reduction is going to be ahead of demand reduction for the rest of the century, so expect high prices, though to cover my self I do not rule out deliberate demand ‘destruction’ reversing the equation for a short periods of time. This might sound like great news for the energy suppliers profits, but it ain’t. For them to maintain current supply they are going to have to spend more and more on capital investment and production costs when energy is getting more expensive. Factor in that the energy corporations are already drowning in debt, and that the debt is only serviceable at current production rates, and that future production is going to cost even more! At some point the financial equations are not going to work and capital investment will cease. Existing stocks will then be run down till they peter out and we return to a solar economy. As a solar economy is where we are headed, best head there now as best we can while the going is easier than later.
To be clear, when I wrote “if the energy producers were like public utilities instead of profit-hungry corporations…”, I was including the producers of natural gas.
Electricity generation in the UK uses only a portion of the UK’s natural gas production (roughly half in 2024).
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688a0938a11f85999440922e/DUKES_2025_Chapter_4.pdf
A natural gas industry that’s nationalised (to some extent, like a public utility) could supply natural gas to domestic power plants at its cost (production costs plus overhead, without profits), to effectively decouple the cost of electricity from the market price of natural gas on international markets. This would insulate the UK’s domestic electricity costs from the effects of wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, for example.
Here’s an example to illustrate the potential effects of nationalisation, with lower and more stable domestic energy prices.
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil and natural gas company is Saudi Aramco. “The current gasoline price in Saudi Arabia is SAR 2.33 per liter or USD 0.62 per liter and was updated on 20-Apr-2026. For comparison, the average price of gasoline in the world is USD 1.42 per liter [more than twice the price]. ”
The current price is Saudi Arabia is equivalent to:
EUR 0.53 per liter (for 95 octane petrol)
GBP 0.46 per liter (for 95 octane petrol)
USD 2.35 per gallon (for 95 octane gasoline)
Looking back at the gasoline/petrol prices in Saudi Arabia during the past year, the price has been stable:
2.33 – Current price (SAR/Liter)
2.33 – One month ago (SAR/Liter)
2.33 – Three months ago (SAR/Liter)
2.33 – One year ago (SAR/Liter)
Looking back at data for the past ten years, “the average gasoline price during that period is SAR 1.95 per liter”, and it didn’t exceed 2.33 SAR/Liter which was also the price 5 years ago.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Saudi-Arabia/gasoline_prices/
It is a mistake to assume George Monbiot is a rational actor. His positions are just phenomena. The same can be said of Tom Murphy. Consider the underlying paradigms of the following people. The first two are rational. The last two are not.
Chris Smaje: A small farm future is the best bet in dealing with collapse.
Me (Walter Haugen): The more alternatives to the System you build before collapse, the better off you will be.
George Monbiot: Small-scale and industrial agriculture are both bad. We need to build high-tech, energy-intensive alternatives to produce algal sludge to eat.
Tom Murphy: Agriculture is bad. But there is no alternative. Just buy food until you cannot. And dismiss and disrespect those actually working on alternatives.
George Monbiot is a rational actor
He is, but his reason is no match for the fundamental predicament of too many people consuming too much stuff.
He is desperately searching for some way of preserving the lives of over 8 billion people, most of whom live in cities. He is searching for a way to escape a massive population overshoot.
That’s Chris’s quest also, hence his proposal for a small farm future. While this is far more rational from an energy standpoint than a future of urbanized sludge eaters, it’s not likely to succeed either. But urbanized sludge eating is all or nothing; if it fails, everyone dies. A small farm future has the advantage of preserving the lives of those who adopt it, however many there may be.
Small farms also have the advantage of being a proven alternative to industrial modernity. They’ve been around for a long time. Murphy’s ideal, hunting and foraging, does too, but it can’t save nearly as many people as small farms can.
Murphy thinks that a world of farmers, regardless of scale, is as ecologically dangerous as industrial modernity. He’s wrong, because the historical slippery slope created by the invention of agriculture was a one-off. We need not fear it… because we’ll never be able to mechanize agriculture ever again.
I agree once mechanization is lost it will never happen again , huge swaths of the world will be abandoned to farming , grain growing on today’s scale has no hope of continuing, the US mid west Russia / Ukraine without railways become useless without mechanization even if they grew some kind of crop it couldn’t be moved to where its wanted , thousands of men and a hell of a lot of horses will be needed on land surrounding cities close to them and there is little hope of that happening .
I grew up on a 230 acre farm in the 1950’s it took two men and three tractors , in 1900 it employed 13 men and their wives part time ,Plus 12 horses , today its part of a huge 1000 acre farm that
employs 1 man .
Agriculture has so few men that know what they are doing ,and even fewer that know how to do it without a tractor , we are in for one hell of a learning curve !
Then there is the land itself , forgetting about fertilisers. that farm was drastically short of sulphur only after testing was sp invented did anyone know that , 1/2 a ton to the acre worked wonders , sulphur was readily available a hundred years earlier no one could test it and sulphur was not available in quantity, many other micro nutrients come out of a bag , A century from now who knows if that type of technology will be available .
Grain from Russia via Baltic sea, and Ukraine via the black sea where being imported to western Europe in the early modern period before the development of railways. The major inland bulk cargo transport mode in early modern economies were the inland waterways, canals and rivers. Most of those networks still exist and are used. Shifting back to non-fossil fueled barges, and stevedores to handle the cargo will be the major shifts required. As for soil analysis, we can but hope. It was done in the past with much simpler equipment, though sourcing the amendments will be much harder, as most sources will be exhausted in a century’s time. However knowing a soil is deficient in specific minerals will tell you to stop flogging a dead horse to use a metaphor.
But not in the quantities of today , every week 2 bulk carriers unload at Liverpool 50,000 tonnes each , one caries human consumption the other animal feed grade , the amount of foodstuffs transported around the world is mind boggling , if you buy a bunch of flowers from a supermarket in the UK most come from Africa flown in to Manchester airport every night , spices too come in by air from around the world .
I’ve been reading the book and enjoying it very much. I respect how you cleave to your own experience on the small holding. Strategy, implementation, reflect, iterate.
Yes, “the author’ and his vanguard of what can only be called aristocrats are going nowhere fast. I want to say they are well meaning, like Joe but the privilege of the Guardians is too ingrained to allow for clear, wide boundary compassion. Sure they talk the talk. So glad to read in your book about the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, 40 years and tens of thousands of acres of organic farms and homesteads and villages run by the people, feeding the people, Joe might want to take a look. We all know the numbers, like you say. What’s the action? Didn’t work? What’s next? How are we going to make this work, it’s all we’ve got?!
There’s a thrutopian novel being written where the crown hands out some lands. And surely the church? I know the people want it. 6000 families in temporary accomodation in Lambeth. Lambeth was 30,000 people in 1800, 300,000 in 1900, it’s about 320,000 now. The destruction of the commons and the building of the railways.
Thanks for the comments – a lot of points of interest. With a fair wind, I hope to find the time for a quick reply next week
http://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/04/25/al-gore-warns-the-day-after-tomorrow-ice-age-could-happen-in-25-years-10-years-after-failed-inconvenient-truth-prophecy/
Al Gore at it again , from the man that made millions from carbon trading , money must have run out of warming so a change of tack to cooling .
Must be money in there somewhere !
‘Fraid I’m a bit too short on time just now for a proper comment, but thanks for these various observations and reading suggestions like Luke Kemp and Isabella Weber. I’m pretty much in agreement with Joe’s comment – a small farm future is going to be hard to realise, but easier than any other one, and there’s nothing to fear about it (at least in comparison to other possible futures).
Regarding nationalisation of energy systems, well I do agree that it’s preferable on the face of it to corporate profit-taking but I can’t see that it would change the picture all that much, especially for countries that are not major fossil fuel producers, unlike Saudi Arabia. As Chris H says, nationalisation isn’t all or nothing – but then perhaps existing state interventions in energy markets already exemplify this middle ground? To address the problem radically it’d be hard to stop at national electricity supply systems – ultimately, the logic would push towards thorough global state control of land, housing and finance as well as energy, and I believe that would still leave the underlying problem mostly untouched. Another problem with nationalisation is that it puts decision-making in the hands of governments that typically favour large-scale and short-term tech solutions – I doubt we’d see much less fossil fuel use. Especially when we have governments that actively favour fossil fuels over low carbon energy, as is now the case in the USA and may be the case soon enough in Britain.
I think I am broadly in favour of nationalisation in the sense of public ownership of utilities and services managed for the common good, and broadly against whatever nationalisation means when the governance of nation states has been essentially captured such that any national enterprise will be managed to be profitable to private investors.
We can’t have nationalisation without nation states and I am not convinced that nation states as we know them are durable enough for the current predicament. I suspect that nationalised systems could make a sort of bumpy transition to localised governance with more subsidiarity, or maybe some of them once could have, but we may have missed the window for that change.
I see a lot of nostalgia for a time when state welfare support was enough to keep most people fed and off the streets; for a time when if the pay and conditions at your job were bad enough you could just go work for the council or even go on the dole and you might not have a great time but you’d get enough to eat. One difference between left-ish nostalgia and right-ish nostalgia is that on the left, people think the state can still make changes that would restore that level of support (while ignoring the colonial economic system it was built on), and on the right people think that the higher level of state support was a mistake and the economic base it was built on could have continued indefinitely if people learned to work hard and didn’t have to pay so much tax or compete for jobs or whatever. Neither position seems realistic to me.
Meanwhile, at the soup kitchen every week I am reminded that nobody is coming to solve our problems.
This week a tree came down in the churchyard. Nobody was injured, but it hit our (listed) stone boundary wall and was quite unstable, as well as blocking the main entrance used for soup kitchen deliveries. Getting the tree surgeons in to make it safe took a wodge of cash we don’t really have and a bunch of my time at a point when I was already short on it. The wall will need repairs sooner than we were hoping, too. Thankfully it was a previously pollarded poplar, so I should be able to turn the leaves and branches into compost pretty easily; I am actually glad of the biomass. But doing this with secateurs (even my fancy electric ones!) for an entire tree worth of branches is going to take ridiculous amounts of time.
If anyone has recommendations for a good electric woodchipper (mains is fine in this case) available in the UK, I am very interested. Most of them seem to promise more than is realistic.
Yikes. Sorry about your tree fall.
My limited experience with (rented, diesel) wood chippers has been almost entirely bad. Even brand new equipment will often fail. Borrowed, small chippers are useless, in my experience.
Luckily for me, our city has a brush drop-off yard where I can also get a load of wood chips for a small fraction of the rental price for a chipper. Or if your object is to just get a pile of wood chips for free, like we do at our community orchard, making friends with the tree servicers really helps. They often have truckloads of wood chips they need to dispose of and can’t sell.
I know this is the opposite of the problem you described…
Good luck!
I remember when there was a central electricity generating board , post office telecom and the gas board , plus the water boards , all set up during or just after the 2 war , it worked , national schemes for the entire country run by people that did not have the profit motive pushing them and they made money that went to the Treasury ,lowering taxes , then Maggie sold off the family silver for a pittance to her pals , prices have gone up and service has gone down ever since .
Rail nationalisation was a disaster , just a way not to pay the rail companies for services rendered , run by people who had no experience in transport other than riding it . in 1937 the LMS ( London , Midland ,Scottish ) railway was the largest employer and most profitable company on the planet , it took the government ten years to bankrupt it .
We see considerable state intervention in the energy market , tens of millions in subsidies to both ” renewable ” and fossil electricity generation ,, fossil receive subsidies to keep steam up ready to fill gaps in renewable supply and renewables will not be built without subsidies . This is either a political boondoggle or political stupidity , solar and wind should be allowed only where they include batteries with the ability to last 48 hours removing the need for base load fossil fuel and the need for electricity prices to go negative as they have in Germany and TX when all the renewables get their act together and produce at the same time .
Prior to nationalisation a lot of the UK’s Electricity was provided by Local Authorities
I once worked with an Electrician who had been trained by the Bristol Corporation Electricity Department and their advertising proudly boasted that Portishead Power Station was the baseload station for the South West.
I have also come across a BCED – Bath Corporation Electricity Department manhole cover.
Back in the late 80’s/early 90’s I had a fascinating conversation with someone whose job it had been to ‘buy up’ many of the smaller suppliers in South Wales after nationalisation, the most interesting one being a Garage that supplied a handful of houses using a former car engine driving a generator.
So perhaps we could bring back more localised electricity providers?
There are certainly arguments for distributed microgeneration, especially if we also move away from 24/7 mains availability.
I have was involved in developing microgrids and tiny solar home systems in the 1990s and early 2000s (Hawaii and Fiji). They often provide lifechanging effects. The solar home systems gave small farmers in Fiji enough power for 4 bright light bulbs and the monthly cost was less than the amount they were paying for kerosene for one lamp.
But we found that maintenance was the big issue. Solar plus battery (often plus inverter) are very sophisticated technically and require expert maintenance technicians. The number of skilled maintenance persons required for distributed microgrids will be far higher than the number required for either big central generation plants or utility scale solar and wind.
Joe, do you think Living Energy Farm’s slightly more simplified approach offers much of an improvement in that regard? They champion NiFe batteries running lights only, everything else (cooker, fridge, bandsaw etc) on ‘direct drive’ or ‘daylight drive’ solar, with DC motors connected directly to the PV panels. Are inverters the weakest link, component wise, or is it more complicated than that?
I do think that electrical simplification, like that at Living Energy Farm, helps reduce maintenance, and nickel-iron batteries are very long lived, but as I remember it, Living Energy Farm had a person who’s job was mostly making sure everything was operational and who also developed new DC systems for the farm. I’m pretty sure the economics of direct-DC are no better than using AC from inverters.
Electricity is wonderful in terms of what it can do. I’ve lived off-grid with solar and hydro (throw in a little wind) electricity almost all my adult life and appreciate it greatly, but I don’t believe electricity can ever be other than an adjunct to an industrial civilization.
There are no analogs in electricity to a smithy or foundry, where the only inputs are the raw materials, heat and manual labor. Nobody can make an electric motor or even a length of electric wire without industrial machines.
Electricity and the devices using it won’t ever be anything other than part of a transitional period between industrialism and an almost entirely post-industrial future.
Non-industrial cultures can use wind and water power directly, manage sophisticated waterworks / irrigation systems, and use fire in myriad useful ways. That’s more than enough exogenous power for humans to have. We won’t have and won’t need electricity in a small farm future.
I think inverters are only necessary if you want to run lots of AC kit; that said there is only so much available as DC. Certainly distributed microgeneration won’t look like what the average wealthy western household is used to.
But I remember my previous parish priest, who gave away most of our seven-day candles at one point, because there were people coming to the soup kitchen who had no electricity at home and therefore no light and it was winter and their kids needed to do homework.
Distributed microgeneration will require more technicians, just as small farms will require more farmers; these are skills that can be learned. But the parts are a lot harder to make from scratch: can cobble together quite a lot by cannibalising existing electronics, but eventually you’re going to need some solder or a capacitor or something, and those are substantially non-trivial to produce locally. At best, everything is going to get much more expensive — but that’s also true of non-electronic tools…
Meanwhile, I am still kindof sad that compressed air isn’t in wide use for home appliances.
Our local museum has a ” micro generator ” on display , made for farms it is a 48 volt dynamo with a two bladed fan on the front , they were sold as kits , you made your own blades out of what you had usually a ten foot two by four chopped out with a axe and draw knife , they charged glass accumulators , 48 volts at around 8 amps , not a lot ,but enough to run a radio .
Thanks all!
Since air and wind were mentioned, anyone here have any experience or tips using a windmill for either pumping or oxygenating water? Also, any pointers for a decent portable shortwave radio (solar and hand-cranked considered) would be much appreciated. Cheers!
“But not in the quantities of today , every week 2 bulk carriers unload at Liverpool 50,000 tonnes each , one caries human consumption the other animal feed grade , the amount of foodstuffs transported around the world is mind boggling , if you buy a bunch of flowers from a supermarket in the UK most come from Africa flown in to Manchester airport every night , spices too come in by air from around the world .”
***
Food transport on lorries around the UK is absurd too. In a c.2009 paperback the author said that 40% of the HGVs on (I think) the dual carriageway and motorway system were carrying food for the UK’s supermarket chains. These nine or so companies have a 90-95% grocery market share.
Kathryn
Somebody described being in one of the South Devon resorts before WW2 – might have been Sidmouth
Electricity came from an engine in the gas works
Went off at midnight when the engineer went home
It can happen again!
And further news not seen in the Guardian or the BBC .
://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/05/ipcc-admits-apocalyptic-climate-scenarios-are-implausible-meaning-most-media-scare-stories-over-last-15-years-are-officially-junk/
For the UK residents who linger on this website, I suggest you watch the price of the UK 10-year gilt. This is available in many places. I check it on the CNBC website, right along with FX, Crypto, Oil and the like. In the past couple of days the yield on the 10-year gilt (10-year government bonds are the benchmark rather than say 30-year or 2-year) went up over 5% and is now settling in at around 4.9%. As I write this, it is 4.934%.
Bonds are needed to fund government wars and increasingly to fund government debt. The US has a government debt of $39 trillion at the moment and it increases another trillion every 100 days or so. The interest payments on government debt in the US and other countries has a significant impact on whether social programs can continue. It is not that Trump just hates Medicaid (which he does!) but that the massive government debt REQUIRES that it be cut. The UK is in deep shit too, as is France. The UK debt-to-GDP ratio is 93%, while the US is at 124% and France is at 116%. These ratios are all far too high to be sustainable in any sense of the word. However, France’s problems are mitigated by its excellent healthcare and social safety net. The UK and US fail on both these measures.
If you see the gilt price go up over 5% again – and stay there! – you might want to buy more prepper items when you go to the store. Tinned meats, rice, toilet paper, etc. In my little corner of the world, I am working hard on growing more potatoes, corn and beans than I wanted to plant. Travel is out the window too. I am even saving money by cutting out alcohol and caffeine. As the website wags like to say, “The shit is getting real.” My latest Substack post is on “Another Emergency Bailout” and it is based on a finance channel’s report on the current bond emergency. In addition to checking wheat prices every day as an indicator, I now check bond yields.
Thanks Walter.
I follow the US 4-week Treasury Bill rate, which measures something different than the 10-year rate, but gives a sense of the current market for US government debt.
The May 5th 4-week auction settled at 3.65%, which is very close to the bottom of a downward trend that started roughly 2 years ago and bottomed last January. I have every reason to believe that these rates are heavily manipulated by anyone with the power to sway them.
A quick search on the US government current expenditures produced some results that I didn’t expect. I would have guessed that US military budget was higher than Medicare, but it isn’t.
Roughly:
$29.86 Trillion : 2026 US GDP (projected)
$7.05 Trillion : 2026 Total US government budget
$1.50 Trillion : 2026 Social Security expense
$1.10 Trillion : 2026 Medicare expense
$1.03 Trillion : 2026 US debt interest expense
$0.96 Trillion : 2026 US military budget
When Warren Buffett says he is in “cash” he means short-term T-bills. I assume he is in the 4-week bills, but I can’t get the corroboration at the moment. Do you know?
At the end of 2025, when Warren Buffett retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, the company’s consolidated assets included $321 Billion in “short-term investments in U.S. Treasury Bills”, *plus* around $48 Billion in “cash and cash equivalents”.
A footnote explained that this $48 Billion in “cash and cash equivalents” included “U.S. Treasury Bills with maturities of three months or less when purchased of $17.6 billion…”
https://berkshirehathaway.com/2025ar/2025ar.pdf
(page K-66)
Hah! Even the lamestream media is looking at collapse scenarios. Here is an article from today’s Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/09/worried-britons-prepping-for-major-disruption-with-stash-of-tins-and-cash-survey-shows
The article mentions power banks, which are not usually addressed. I tested a couple and I like this one. The reasons are: 1) It holds its power for months without using it. 2) It recharges quickly in the sun. 3) It can be recharged from the grid with a USB-C connection. 4) Multiple light modes, including a blue/red mode if you are stranded on the road. I recently bought another one of these. Since I live in France, I got it from Amazon.fr. Current price is 23 euros. I am sure there are similar power banks available in the UK and US.
https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B0C9MCCCS4?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1
The thinking for most purposes is as follows. A complete collapse before breakfast is not likely. A decline scenario is most likely. This scenario has a time continuum. How fast? How long does it last? My own particular paradigm is called SML, for short-, mid-, and long-term solutions. You will want to derive your own unique solutions based on your situation. Putting them in an SML paradigm means you cover your bases. One should prepare for a national emergency like a power outage, but that also provides a base for mid- and long-term prepping. So if you have extra food in case of a power outage, this provides a starting point for mid-term preparedness. (The long-term preparedness is get out of the city and embrace SFF – a small farm future.) Just buy more shelf-stable food when you go to the store and rotate your stocks. Over time you get more “prepped,” both in the physical and your mental environments. This goes for other items AND skills you should learn.
In planning for collapse scenarios, we really don’t know how fast or how far decline proceeds to contraction and eventually system collapse. This is because of the interactive variables (And YOU are one of them!) The most likely scenario is for a grid interruption that proceeds downhill. Keeping your phone charged is a key factor. Having a power bank available provides communication and public safety alerts. The Baghdad Scenario is most likely the first step downhill. This means intermittent power on a daily basis. Your freezer will not work on this basis, but charging your devices AND your power banks for the down-times helps you “smooth out” the power interruptions. This kind of thinking can be applied to all your other situations. Having tinned meats and a variety of condiments helps fill out your rice and beans. Getting used to going without meals is a skill too. Getting up and doing stuff in the morning without coffee or food is a natural human function. On the farm I grew up on, the cows always ate before we did.
If you have already gone down this road – GREAT! You are ahead of the game.
LNG will be the problem soon for Europe / UK , Russia is a no no , the gulf is closed down the USA is incapable of filling the gap . Europe’s reserves are empty ,it takes six weeks for a tanker to get from the gulf to Europe ,no deliveries for six weeks if they started out today ! its going to be a cold dark winter in Europe if things don’t happen very quickly ,Hormuz is closed , LNG production is damaged and inoperable at the moment and the last LNG tankers that were loaded before the war are unloading now . There is lots of waffle about jet fuel becoming short , jet fuel is nothing compared to the lights going out your central heating and power stations out of fuel and industry collapsing, Better start stocking up now !
Hawaii, where I live, has some special vulnerabilities, but most big metropolitan areas are subject to a similar situation: just about every supply chain for food and medicine has been converted to just-in-time delivery. Basically, the only food storage is in the store and in the containers headed to the store. There are no gigantic warehouses with weeks of food stockpiled to smooth out deliveries.
I’m a long-term prepper, but I was still aghast at how fragile food supply chains can be. The video link below is about Hawaii and starts with the supply problems encountered during the pandemic, but the JIT system is common everywhere and every city is days away from running out of food.
The official state policy here is that every family will be on their own in the aftermath of a supply chain disruption. Two weeks supply of food is the recommended minimum, but that doesn’t seem like nearly enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abUCdHAaQJk
Our chest freezer can go for a couple of days without power when it’s full — maybe only 36h in very hot weather — without things defrosting. The refrigerator not so much. I’m not sure how many hours of electricity the freezer actually needs per day but the solar panels on the house should be sufficient to run it.
Of course, if there aren’t enough hours of electricity to run the freezer as a freezer we could probably still run it as a refrigerator. I should probably get some more thermometers for keeping an eye on that sort of thing.
I’ve found power banks combined with external portable solar panels work a lot better for my needs than an all-in-one unit. There is a solar panel on my bike basket and it generally charges a power bank while I’m out and about, which can then be used for my phone, headlamp and so on. The EU legislation around standardised charters making USB-C ubiquitous has been a real boon for interoperability.
http://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/05/09/cattle-theft-in-germany-organised-gangs-target-farms
The problem will be keeping what you have , running a semi up to a farm and loading it up is not a small enterprise ! Round here cattle are disappearing just a few at a time , not a truck load , criminals can still be executed for rustling cattle but its very lucrative , A friend sold A 700 pound steer for $2840 , prices have doubled since 2020 , cattle numbers are around the same as in the 1950′ s , no one has been shot yet ,its just a matter of time .
Yeah, the mood shift has been palpable for a while, but seems to be quickening. Small wonder, with all the ill considered power plays and global seisms we witness daily.
Having gone down the road a ways, one starts seeing even more of the complex interconnections still we personally still rely on.
We can, dehydrate, ferment, and of course freeze things we’ve grown ourselves, as well as all the dry beans and wheat we’ve put up. And it’s not enough for the worst scenarios, but it will have to do, you can only do so much.
The current conflict would seem to be the perfect wakeup call, but stocks are still doing fine, and all seem to think that once the straight is open, we can go back to normal. Hopefully, there will be a large segment that in the coming weeks/months do “get it”, and start the journey.
And here is a review of Chris’ latest book:
https://mereorthodoxy.com/common-life-after-social-collapse
Just to look at peoples perceptions , the use of mobile phones during chaos , during the ice storms here in TX a few years ago people lost connection as soon as the power went off , there was /is laws stating 48 hours of battery back up , didn’t happen , the batteries were either never fitted , discharged or just plain missing . The three towers near me have no batteries , A few in the boonies of west TX have batteries and solar panels , only land lines worked .
For anyone who is in the area and interested.
Samuel Lewis, of 21st Century Hoe Farming fame, is at The Green Scythe Fair this year doing a free Hoe Farming workshop on the Saturday.
I’ve booked myself on. Might see some of you there?
I’m about as far away from Somerset as one can get on this earth, so I won’t be there. Please give us a report of your experience.
I don’t think I can make it but am sorry for that — I would love to be there!
In comments on a previous post I alluded to some changes coming up…
I am pleased to announce that I have been recommended for training for ordained ministry in the Church of England.
I don’t know all the details yet, but I might start theological college as early as September. That has interesting implications for my allotment work, as my preference is for residential training (the College of the Resurrection is in the grounds of an actual monastery and I fell in love with the place when I went to their Open Day, but I still have to be accepted onto the course, I can’t just turn up!); I may be trying my lower-labour mostly-staples scheme on a larger scale sooner than I had previously planned.
However if all goes smoothly from here the basic trajectory will be:
2-3 years theological college, including some placements in various parish and chaplaincy contexts
Find a curacy (a sort of training post in a parish that already has a priest)
Ordination as a deacon
Serve one year of curacy
Ordination as a priest
Serve another year or two or three of curacy
Find a job as a parish priest somewhere. Or a chaplain (school, hospital, prison), or at a cathedral, or something. Or go off and found my own semi-monastic community, even… the process of discernment doesn’t stop now.
I’m happy for you! From my distant vantage, this new path seems very appropriate. Good luck.
Very promising direction, Kathryn. Maybe in your time you could revolutionise the way church lands and graveyards are kept. Our village cemetary is perhaps the most kempt and cared for green space. It borders a woodland and has pines along the perimeter. But why not nut or fruit trees? I’m sure you’ll cross-pollinate your interests in a convivial way. Go for it!
Thank you, Simon.
The short answer to why not fruit or nut trees along the cemetery border may have to do with any of the following:
– the pines are already there; if large enough they may be subject to tree protection orders
– fruit and nut trees are mostly deciduous, which means they don’t act as a very good windbreak in winter; they also require a lot more care than pines
– people coming to visit graves might not want to deal with pathways sticky with fallen fruit, wasps, rats etc, and there may not be the labour available to deal with all of that, either
– nobody really thought of it
I might be able to address the last one!
A Rocha UK are probably the best organisation for making a difference to the ecological state of churchyards here; they do actually have some momentum.
Thank you, Joe.
Sounds great Kathryn.
Good luck with it all.
Will you still have time to post here?!
Thank you, John.
I imagine I will still be online at least some, yes; the question of how my own vocation fits into a drastically different view of the future than many people are willing to imagine is one that won’t go away anytime soon, and Chris’s posts are always good food for thought in that regard.
And if I really do move into the grounds of a monastery it will be a lot of fun to shift my usual little allotment update tangents to observations on the state of the gardens and grounds…. I think the current lot of monastic brothers are now mostly old enough that they don’t do much physical labour, but there is at least one with a keen interest in it, and they are certainly self-sufficient in rhubarb if nothing else!
Apologies, I’ve been very offline lately. Congratulations Kathryn on your news. I hope you’ll keep commenting here with some dispatches from your new journey. I’ll try to get some posts out again soon.
Thank you, Chris. I do intend to keep commenting if I possibly can!
For now, I’m trying to tie up a lot of loose ends and figure out whether I’ll be doing residential or non-residential training. And I’m drying herbs and flowers for tea… at the moment I have elderflower, lemon balm, white clover, pineapple weed, calamint and yarrow on the go, though I could do with more of the pineapple weed and yarrow. If I do end up training residentially I’ll be on some kind of catered meal plan, and herbal tea seems like a good way to bring a bit of my local stomping ground with me.