The Small Farm Future Blog

RIP The Land, 2006-2026

Posted on August 24, 2026 | 1 Comment

Just a short post to mark the passing of the great Land magazine, which has shut up shop with its 37^th issue this summer.

What can I say about it?  For almost as many years as I’ve been following a more land-based way of life, The Land has been a guiding light for so many of the issues that matter to me – low-impact living and farming, access to land, poverty and inequality, climate change, nature and biodiversity, and the machinations of the anti-human and anti-nature juggernaut of the present global political economy.

On all these issues, I often feel I’m on a different wavelength to many of the people around me, so it’s been a real pleasure to find a house journal of like-minded folk ploughing this lonely furrow (two house journals I guess, if you include this blog and its much-loved band of colourful soil-bothering collapsenik commenters). Although it ventured more widely at times, The Land represented a particular kind of British, or more specifically English, (mostly) rural radicalism in the spirit of Cobbett and Morris – unashamedly homespun and old-fashioned in its way, but ever curious and thoughtful about the politics of the day and the wider trajectory of the world. Great pictures too.

When I started writing about food, farming and politics The Land seemed like too lofty and forbidding a peak of excellence and radicalism for me to place an article. Eventually I became a regular contributor. Working with its various editors – Gill Barron, Mike Hannis, Ed Hamer and Simon Fairlie – turned out to be less forbidding than I’d imagined, indeed one of the easier and more pleasurable experiences I’ve had in the writing business over the years. As well as editors, they were skilful, smart and funny writers themselves, and it’s been an education to me tracking their thinking over the years. Simon’s unique and educated but earthy talents as an agrarian thinker and writer have been a particular influence. A genuine radical in all the best senses of the word, he and the other editors have done great service in avoiding the well-trodden path of corporate-friendly ecomodernist tech solutionism followed by so many other supposed radical public intellectuals, instead sketching more original, plausible and considered visions emerging out of this truth of the magazine’s manifesto:

Nothing is forever in history, except geography. The only source of wealth is the earth. Capitalism is a confidence trick, a dazzling edifice built on paper promises. When it crumbles, the land will remain.

Unfortunately, The Land itself will not. Indeed, nothing is forever, but I can’t help lamenting the passing of another wonderful grassroots venture sustained by the political fire in people’s bellies – almost a samizdat effort in the face of the deep-but-murky funding sustaining the output of too many thinktanks, NGOs and mainstream journalists.

It’s an unequal battle to get voices other than technocratic solutionism heard, so I salute The Land’s editors for carrying the torch for so long. In the final issue, Gill writes in a valedictory comment “Articles on land-related subjects now appear frequently in mainstream newspapers, and online, rather annoyingly pre-empting our reports. This slow-news magazine has thus become a bit redundant”.

I’m not so sure! Reports that deal with land-related subjects in mainstream newspapers with the depth and subtlety of The Land are as rare as hen’s teeth. Still, I can hardly begrudge Gill calling it a day in these crazy times after years of stalwart service – my best wishes to her and to everyone else who made The Land happen. Where I certainly do agree with her is here: “it’s time to celebrate the unlikely survival of this small-circulation, entirely reader-funded, gloriously advert- and sponsor-free, altogether independent and hopelessly un-trendy magazine for two whole decades”. Amen to that.

Anyway, bringing things back to this blog and its concerns, there are two articles of mine in the final issue of The Land. One of them is an abridged version of this post in which I try to combat the disinformation about me in particular and the food system in general peddled by George Monbiot, a sometime associate of the The Land’s editors who’s now left the fold. The other is a review of Nick Bano’s book Against Landlords and a wider reflection on the issue of landlordism and economic rent in contemporary society. I plan to republish the latter article in my next post, and then follow it up with some wider personal reflections.