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 February 21, 2016 | 38 Comments
It’s been about a year since I published my article on perennial grain crops in the journal Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems1 so maybe it’s time to revisit this teasing topic. Other reasons to return to it…well, I seem to be in the midst of a series of posts on things that are leading us astray from the true path of sustainable agriculture so why not toss another brick onto the barbecue before turning to something more constructive? Then there’s yet another new article, this time in Permaculture Magazine, heralding the imminent solution to the world’s problems once the Land …
Continue readingPosted on February 10, 2016 | 31 Comments
A recent article on Resilience.org proclaimed that ‘the commons is the future’, so let me state my thesis plainly at the outset: no it isn’t, and in the event that humanity manages to create sustainable societies and/or sustainable resource use in the future, common property regimes will likely only have a fairly minor role to play in them. I’m not going to dwell much on the Resilience article, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t, but the general position I’m staking seems to put me at odds with a lot of environmental and egalitarian-minded people …
Continue readingPosted on January 30, 2016 | 12 Comments
The year, I know, is scarce begun, and yet already I feel able to offer you three strong contenders for this new annual award from the small farm future stable, culled from my recent trip to the Oxford Real Farming Conference. Now, trade unionism gets a bad press these days, and I have to admit that for all its associations with progressive leftism, the movement has mined a rich historic seam of small-minded conservatism and unenlightened self-interest. Still, you only have to look at what happens in the absence of trade unions to appreciate their importance – for example, in …
Continue readingPosted on January 24, 2016 | 15 Comments
I gave two talks recently at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. One concerned peasant agriculture, which I’m planning to come back to on this blog later in the year as part of a series on constructing a neo-peasant agriculture for contemporary times. The other was at a session inaugurating the College for Real Farming and Food Culture, brainchild of science writer and ORFC founder Colin Tudge. Colin asked me to describe my experiences establishing a small, ecologically-minded farming business, the obstacles we’d faced and how we’d overcome them. I only had a few minutes of the floor, and I didn’t …
Continue readingPosted on January 17, 2016 | 37 Comments
Veterans of this blog may recall that some time ago I had a fascinating discussion about the ‘balance of nature’ with a curious fellow who turned out to be none other than the devil himself. Well, blow me if I didn’t meet him again as I journeyed home from the Oxford Real Farming Conference. He was sitting in a shadowed corner of the train carriage, hunched over a thick pile of papers and books, but unmistakeably my old friend Nick. We had another very interesting conversation so I thought I’d write it down as well as I can remember it …
Continue readingPosted on January 8, 2016 | 4 Comments
A belated happy new year from Small Farm Future. I’ve been off the farm (and blessedly computer-free) for quite a while over the holidays, most recently at the ever-informative Oxford Real Farming Conference. So I have a lot of farm work and a lot of writing and blogging to catch up on. The former is going to start asserting its priority over the latter, so please forgive me if the blog posts become a bit more sporadic. If in the coming weeks you should need to fill that Small-Farm-Future-shaped hole in your life – a problem no doubt shared with …
Continue readingPosted on December 22, 2015 | 17 Comments
And so we come to Small Farm Future’s final post of 2015. And what a year it’s been. We’ve battled with the over-optimism of perennial grain breeders, ecomodernists and perennial polyculture proponents. We’ve been endorsed by George Monbiot, chastised by Tom Merchant, dismissed by the Land Institute, ridiculed by the Breakthrough Institute and publicised by the good folks at Resilience.org. We’ve had spinoff articles in The Land, in the august academic journal Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems, at Dark Mountain and at Statistics Views. We’ve even managed to sell some vegetables, raise some livestock, and harvest some wood for the …
Continue readingPosted on December 16, 2015 | 40 Comments
A recent visit to the Scottish Highlands prompted some thoughts on several favoured themes of mine: the resilience or otherwise of local economies grounded in small-scale agricultural production, problems of migration as featured in a recent post, and questions concerning ‘modernization’ and economic development. So let’s take a brief tour around the Highlands and their history to help muse on the topic of a small farm future. Perhaps the first thing a southerner notices on the long drive north is the narrowing of the roads and the thinning of the population. In many of the Highland glens there’s little but …
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