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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on May 18, 2021 | 49 Comments
The quotation in my title comes from a brief online review of my book from someone who clearly wasn’t a fan. I suspect the person concerned didn’t actually read the book, but no matter. For my part, it seems to me quite likely that a billion people or more will die prematurely if we don’t soon implement something like the small farm future that I describe in the book. It’s worth sitting awhile with that contradiction. What an extraordinary moment in history when different people think that either persisting with or not persisting with the regnant political economy might slay …
Continue readingPosted on May 13, 2021 | 13 Comments
I’m going to interrupt my present blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future for one post to comment on recent political events in Britain. Where this post ends up in fact is pretty relevant to some of the larger arguments of my book. The events I’m referring to are last Thursday’s elections in which, among other things, many people across the country voted for their local councils, electors in Wales and Scotland voted for their national assemblies and – most prominent in the news – a byelection in the ‘postindustrial’ northeast English town of Hartlepool that had previously …
Continue readingPosted on May 2, 2021 | 92 Comments
…is a vegan diet. Well, at least it is according to Joseph Poore. But I have an alternative suggestion. The single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth is to stop thinking there’s a single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, or that bang for your buck metrics of this kind are helpful in formulating how best to live. Here, I’ll elaborate that suggestion, grounding the discussion in the debate about veganism versus livestock farming. The debate gets a lot of airtime, and I’ll only touch lightly on a few aspects of it here. I …
Continue readingPosted on April 21, 2021 | 56 Comments
In this post I’m going to sweep up some issues left hanging from comments under my last one, along with further issues lurking within Part II of my book A Small Farm Future, and all wrapped up inside a larger point of contention. Each of these issues on its own could fill several posts, so we’re in for a bumpy ride. Let’s start with the larger point of contention. In the face of contemporary environmental and agricultural problems, there’s a danger of succumbing to magic bullet, techno-fix thinking without paying attention to trade-offs and deeper complexities, or to socio-political issues. …
Continue readingPosted on April 6, 2021 | 27 Comments
I’m going to continue my theme from my last post about organic fertility in future farming, picking up on a few of the very interesting comments that people made in response to it. Apologies that it’s taken me a while to get around to this follow up post – work just keeps finding me. In fact, I’m going to keep this briefer than originally planned so as to keep my head above the water. Anyway, many thanks for the comments. For the most part, I’m not going to respond to named individuals, instead focusing on the general issues people raised. …
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