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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 19, 2018 | 55 Comments
My previous post offered a retrospective take on my ‘Peasant’s Republic of Wessex’ post cycle that I completed a while back. I thought I might now turn to another such retrospective, this time on my recently-completed ‘History of the world’ cycle. So I’d like to offer a few thoughts on the way we think about history, with the help of a couple of books from my recent reading. JG Ballard’s Crash is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read – a novel about people who are sexually aroused by cars, and in particular by deaths and injuries in car …
Continue readingPosted on February 8, 2018 | 54 Comments
My title comes from a 19th century English song, which includes this verse… If all the land in England was divided up quite fair / There would be work for everyone to earn an honest share / Well some have thousand acre farms which they have got somehow / But I’ll be satisfied to get three acres and a cow …but more immediately, it comes from a great evening of folksong and storytelling I heard recently in which Robin Grey and Katherine Hallewell told – well, not quite the history of the world in 10½ blog posts so much as the history of …
Continue readingPosted on January 29, 2018 | 37 Comments
I said that I wanted to focus on the shape of possible agrarian, post-capitalist states of the future in my forthcoming writing, so I thought I’d anticipate that here by reproducing my article from the current issue of The Land magazine (Issue 22, 2018, pp.28-30). The editors of that august journal in their wisdom entitled it ‘The human hive’ (and accompanied it with some beautiful woodcut illustrations of an apian nature), but here it goes under my preferred title of ‘The supersedure state’. My next few posts are going to attend to various other items of business – though some …
Continue readingPosted on January 22, 2018 | 24 Comments
Perhaps I should essay a brief report here on things I heard and learned at the 2018 Oxford Real Farming Conference that I attended a couple of weeks back. If I try to lay it all out in connected prose I’ll probably come grinding to a halt after about 5,000 words, so I thought I’d present it mostly in the form either of little news snippets or of one-sentence assertions…the latter being things I heard people say, or thoughts I had while listening at the conference. So I don’t necessarily agree with all of these assertions, some of which are …
Continue readingPosted on January 15, 2018 | 86 Comments
Another year, another speech about GM crops at the Oxford Farming Conference by renegade environmentalist and ecomodernist provocateur, Mark Lynas. Back in 2013, Mark gave a speech to the OFC in which he recanted his opposition to GM crops and turned his guns on his erstwhile comrades in the anti-GM and wider organic and environmentalist movements. It gained extensive media coverage. Well, there’s nothing the ‘mainstream media’ (more on that concept in a forthcoming post…) like more than a former radical rejoining the fold… This time, Mark returns with a much more conciliatory message, offering what he calls an “olive …
Continue readingPosted on January 8, 2018 | 34 Comments
A happy new year to you from Small Farm Future. So many things to write about in 2018…especially after getting back from the ninth Oxford Real Farming Conference, the biggest and best yet. The main theme I want to examine this year is the political shape of the state, specifically the agrarian states that I hope in the future may hold some promise for getting us out of the mess we’re currently in. On that note, my article on what I call the ‘supersedure state’ has just been published in the latest issue of The Land Magazine1. I’ll be republishing …
Continue readingPosted on December 18, 2017 | 82 Comments
Danny Dorling’s book Population 10 Billion1 has been sitting in the in-tray of the Small Farm Future review department (along with a whole load of other books) for a couple of years now. I’ve been on their case about it, but until now I’ve had nothing from those slackers. Maybe I should introduce performance related pay… On which note, just a shout out for this blog’s seasonal appeal for funds, Wikipedia-style: “if every reader of Small Farm Future donated, er, about £1,000 annually, I could devote myself to it full-time and turn out the reviews a lot faster.” Or maybe …
Continue readingPosted on December 11, 2017 | 49 Comments
As I’ve mentioned, I recently visited Nicaragua as part of a research project on ‘Transitions to agro-ecological food systems’ that I’ve been involved with, conducted by the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. The research involved working with agro-ecological farmers in the UK, Senegal and Nicaragua, and the trip brought together some of the farmers and researchers from each country. In this post, I thought I’d offer a few informal reflections on the research, and the Nicaragua trip. In each country, the researchers took a kind of ‘citizen’s jury’ approach to the project, getting the farmers to …
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