Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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I’ve been blogging about farming, ecology and politics since 2012. I welcome well-tempered discussion. Please note that if you’re a new commenter, or if you include a lot of links, your comment will go into the moderation queue before publication. I sometimes miss comments in the queue so feel free to nudge me via the Contact Form if your comment fails to appear.
Posted on July 14, 2021 | 42 Comments
The Land Magazine has just published a long article from me in which I sketch some key issues facing small farm societies of the future, anticipating much that I want to say in the remainder of this blog cycle concerning my book A Small Farm Future. I’ll reproduce the article in my next post and expand on it in future ones. In this post, I’m just going to mention a few points from it, relating them to an issue that seems to have blown up in alternative farming circles in the USA concerning the alleged racism of small-scale family farms, …
Continue readingPosted on July 6, 2021 | 21 Comments
In Parts I and II of A Small Farm Future I build an argument that local, low energy, agrarian societies are probably best placed to meet the challenges of our times, and in Parts III and IV – which I’m now turning to discuss – I examine some of the issues such societies will face and how these societies might emerge out of present global politics. A few critics of the book – some quite friendly, others less so – have ventured the opinion that the small farm societies I describe have their problems, and that the best-case scenarios I …
Continue readingPosted on June 27, 2021 | 31 Comments
And so I’ve come to the end of my posts concerning Part II of A Small Farm Future and I shall soon be moving onto Parts III and IV, which are the ones that have generated most of the discussions and disputations over the book. I include this post by way of a deep breath, reflecting back on the ground we’ve recently covered and forward toward what’s to come. Let me begin by reprising the tale of our woodland here at Vallis Veg, which I’ve previously discussed here, among other places. Between 2004 and 2007 we planted seven acres of …
Continue readingPosted on June 22, 2021 | 24 Comments
A bit of news from the home front here at Small Farm Future, and a few reflections based around it. Today, my wife received a suspended prison sentence for disrupting a court as an act of protest against government inaction on climate change. Here is a short video she made explaining her behaviour and making the case for radical action beyond business as usual, with her own vision focused around small-scale farming. Please share it with your networks if you’re minded to – pebbles, ripples and all that. At an earlier court appearance, she was troubled to be told by …
Continue readingPosted on June 14, 2021 | 47 Comments
Since my book A Small Farm Future makes quite a play for local self-reliance, I thought I should at least temporarily try to put my money (or, more pertinently, my produce) where my mouth is by only eating food produced on my farm for a week. I did this in the middle of September last year, when most of the folks in my household were away on a trip and I thought the exercise would be less distracting. I don’t suggest that by doing so I’ve proved anything much in terms of larger arguments about agrarian localism, but I found …
Continue readingPosted on June 3, 2021 | 45 Comments
Chapter 11 of A Small Farm Future is predominantly a number-crunching exercise showing that Britain could feed a population of 83 million people using organic farming methods with locally generated fertility when yields are generally assumed to be 10% lower than the lowest bound of current organic crop yields, and with minimal fossil fuel use on-farm. The kind of analysis I did will be familiar to readers of this blog who followed my posts about feeding the Peasants’ Republic of Wessex, but in this case I applied the analysis to the whole country. I didn’t apply it to the whole …
Continue readingPosted on June 2, 2021 | 2 Comments
Just a quick ‘meta’ post relating to a couple of things, then back to my current blog cycle working through A Small Farm Future shortly after. First, I’ve heard from various people that they’ve been having trouble accessing my site. My apologies – and my thanks for letting me know. I think I’ve now fixed the problem by reverting the permalinks to the basic format. This means that all the hyperlinks in my posts over recent years linking internally to other posts or comments on my website no longer work, but in the grand scheme of human suffering this seems …
Continue readingPosted on May 26, 2021 | 23 Comments
The first draft of A Small Farm Future had a chapter called ‘Labour on the farm’ which didn’t make the final version. I needed to cut the length, and although there were parts of this chapter I was quite attached to, I felt I hadn’t nailed the issues as well as I’d like, so it was easy to spike. Some passages found their way into other parts of the book, but I’d been hoping to make good on the issue in this blog cycle with parts of the deleted chapter and my own more polished thoughts. Trouble is, I still …
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