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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 February 13, 2025 | 45 Comments
Apologies for my silence here – the book-writing has been in overdrive, and I’ve also been trying (with limited success) to keep up with the winter’s woodland work. Anyway, some moments of respite today. Time enough for a blog post with brief notes on three things, viz. My forthcoming book Manufactured food newsflash Lifehouses? Finding Lights in a Dark Age So, I now have a final title and subtitle for my new book after much discussion with my publisher – Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft. Not sure of an exact publication date yet but …
Continue readingPosted on January 16, 2025 | 47 Comments
Just a brief post to thank readers here and on Substack for a bunch of great comments and recommendations under my last post. I’m in book-writing overdrive at the moment so apologies for not responding. However, today I finished the first draft of Chapter 6 so I thought a quick peep over the parapet would be in order. The basic structure of my life has been pretty simple of late. Get up. Eat something. Light the (sustainable) woodstove. Check on the (sustainable) sheep. Write. Eat something again. Write some more. Eat some more. Read. Go to bed. Recently we had …
Continue readingPosted on January 6, 2025 | 107 Comments
Happy new year. I’m pretty deep in book-writing mode at the moment, and therefore unlikely to have much to offer here for another couple of months. But I thought I’d put out an open comment post inviting readers to debate a few points and questions, which I will then shamelessly plunder as material for my book. So … I’ve been a regular visitor at my wonderful local bookshop Hunting Raven recently, buying various forbidding non-fiction titles by way of background research for my own book. One of the staff asked jokingly if I ever just settled down with a good …
Continue readingPosted on December 21, 2024 | 44 Comments
And so we come to the end of another year’s blogging. Twenty-six posts authored by the editor-in-chief here, with two guest posts from Alice and Jake – my thanks to them. All told, there were 1,886 comments (including my responses) to my own authored posts. And, when aggregated, my posts amounted to 68,704 words. Sheesh, I got so exhausted from all that blog writing that I decided to take a break and do something different – so now I’m writing a book. Sincerest thanks to all commenters for keeping things alive here. My least commented post was Another England, or …
Continue readingPosted on December 11, 2024 | 52 Comments
I wrote a long review article that’s just been published in The Land magazine, engaging critically with various books bearing on farming and wildlife in Britain, but hopefully of wider interest. I’m reproducing it here (if I have time I may give a bit of background to it in my next post): It’s fallen to me to honour the promise in The Land 34 of reviewing Guy Shrubsole’s new book, The Lie of the Land. I can only do this by putting it into a wider context, so this essay considers not only aspects of Guy’s preceding book, The Lost …
Continue readingPosted on December 1, 2024 | 33 Comments
Problem: how to keep this blog ticking over while I write my book. Solution: another guest post Much as I abhor nepotism, sometimes there’s nothing like family when it comes to getting you out of a hole. So I’m pleased to bring you the piece below from my son Jake, based around the research he’s doing with small-scale farmers in Bangladesh as part of his PhD at the London School of Economics. Over to Jake – Bangladesh is a small country that sits within the Northeast of South Asia with India wrapped around it, and Myanmar to the South. …
Continue readingPosted on November 17, 2024 | 122 Comments
A few news items curated for you from the Small Farm Future office: 1. Lights in a Dark Age First, the aforementioned office is pretty much where I’m going to be living for the next few months, having just signed a contract with Chelsea Green to write a new book provisionally entitled Lights in a Dark Age with a view to publication in Autumn 2025. I’ll say a bit more about the book in future posts but since most of it isn’t written yet I spy an opportunity for some reader input. So, two questions: Taking the title as your …
Continue readingPosted on November 1, 2024 | 102 Comments
Apologies that I’ve been so silent on here of late. Too much going on. My thanks though to Alice for keeping the flame burning here with her guest post – very interesting discussion. In other news, Jim Thomas has filed this interesting report from COP16 in Cali, and in its budget this week the British government has applied limited inheritance tax for the first time to farmland transfers. Meanwhile, environment secretary Steve Reed has said that farmers and conservationists will have to “learn to do more with less”. Fascinating to see how that one turns out… More on those perhaps …
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