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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on October 7, 2024 | 75 Comments
I’m publishing below a guest post by Alice Holloway. Alice’s partner, Joel, is a regular commenter here and has mentioned the idea of a care home farm in a couple of his comments – here’s the full lowdown! I don’t usually publish guest posts, but I’m short on time to keep writing this blog at the moment. Picking up on themes discussed under recent posts, I’m also interested in seeing how people flesh out their varied visions for agrarian local futures, and Alice’s post fits that bill admirably. I’m potentially up for publishing other guest posts along these lines, but …
Continue readingPosted on September 22, 2024 | 76 Comments
The news cycle just keeps spinning in the murky, corporate-fuelled spaces of the alt-meat and political influencing industries, so although I signalled my intention in my last post to move on from my critique of ecomodernism, I think a quick news bulletin is in order before I pause and take stock in the latter part of this post. First, reports are in that one of the major players in the US microbial food industry, Motif Foodworks, has lost an ‘incredibly bitter’ dispute with Impossible Foods over patents for a genetically-engineered (and so-called ‘precision fermented’) protein called heme. After the court …
Continue readingPosted on September 15, 2024 | 89 Comments
There’s one last bit of business outstanding from my previous project critiquing ecomodernism. This concerns the forces that may drive either ruralisation or further urbanisation in the future. In comments on this site, perhaps most relevantly here and here, Cameron Roberts disagreed with my view that future ruralisation is likely – and that if we don’t try to make it happen by design soon, it’ll happen by default later. I said I’d offer a longer analysis of this issue, and here it is. I’m going to structure it around Cameron’s comments, but his points are widely held so I see …
Continue readingPosted on August 26, 2024 | 220 Comments
A couple of news items just in, relating to my recent critiques of manufactured food. Apologies for harping back to this theme, but I think it’s worth keeping an eye on the unfolding story. At the end, I’ll cast forward to new themes. So, this recent article is another rather starry-eyed piece heralding the bright future for Solein, the protein powder manufactured from bacteria by the Finnish company Solar Foods. What’s interesting about it is that it gives a few facts and figures about the company’s production processes, presumably derived from the company itself, which corroborate figures I provided in …
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