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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 30, 2015 | 12 Comments
My previous post addressed the ancient agricultural commons of preindustrial England. Here I’m going to look at some issues about contemporary commons, before wrapping up this little odyssey on the commoning theme in my next post. Although many agricultural commons still exist among small-scale farmers globally, the hot commons issues nowadays aren’t about common land resources so much as intellectual property rights, copyright, digital commons and so forth. I can’t say that I’m much of an expert on all that, but since my main occupations are as a small-scale farmer and a small-scale writer I do have a passing interest …
Continue readingPosted on June 22, 2015 | 4 Comments
At the end of my last post I floated some questions about property rights and resource use, which I aim to address here – albeit obliquely – with a look at an old book about an old subject, but one that’s highly relevant to present day issues: historian J.M.Neeson’s Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. I’ll follow it up with another post or two about the concept of the commons and its relevance today. Neeson effectively dispels, if indeed it still needs dispelling, Garrett Hardin’s misleading concept of ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Instead she finds …
Continue readingPosted on June 11, 2015 | 7 Comments
Time to bring it all back home today, with a sneaky behind the scenes virtual tour of Small Farm Future’s corporate headquarters. The picture at left gives an overview of the complex, as seen from the lofty throne of the outdoor compost toilet. Funny that in these days of retro fashion the backyard loo hasn’t made a return to every hipster’s homestead wishlist. Ah well, more evidence that SFF is ahead of the curve. So let me walk you through the various accoutrements visible on the edifice’s southern wing. At left is the satellite broadband dish through which my jeremiads …
Continue readingPosted on June 3, 2015 | 11 Comments
Some thoughts today on the weighty matters of my title, prompted by Tom’s departing broadside against me a couple of posts back. Perhaps I ought to just ignore it, but I’m slightly troubled by the fact that someone who’s been reading my blog for a while should (mis)interpret my thinking as he does. I’m sure the fault is largely mine, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to restate and clarify some of the main themes of this blog, and to lay down a future marker. If I accepted Tom’s stance on where the world is at I should probably …
Continue readingPosted on May 28, 2015 | 18 Comments
Today a few musings prompted by a characteristically thoughtful and lyrical post on haymaking by Brian Miller. As Brian points out, there’s really no comparison between the speed of hand or indeed horse-powered haymaking and what can be achieved even by a small 45hp tractor, let alone by a big one. The way that’s worked out in ‘developed’ country farming on a straightforward cost accounting basis is that fiscal output over fiscal input favours the tractor every time, and it also favours the big tractor over the small one, which is why the agricultural landscape in so many ‘developed’ countries …
Continue readingPosted on May 20, 2015 | 21 Comments
…and a brief rumination on statistics. First up, this recent post by Elizabeth Royte about city agriculture, claiming that 20% of the world’s food is grown in urban farms. Cue appropriately incredulous responses from commenters below the post questioning the figure. Think about it. Roughly half the world’s people live in towns, so assuming urban agriculture feeds only urban people, the suggestion is that around 40% of the food eaten in towns is grown in them. Hmmm. In response to the doubters, Royte refers to this report from the Worldwatch Institute, whence the figure derives. The report states “Roughly 15–20 …
Continue readingPosted on May 13, 2015 | 15 Comments
I don’t make a habit of discussing party politics on this blog, but I guess a few comments on the recent British elections are in order. Farming was basically a non-issue in the election, but the result has certainly disproved an old agricultural adage. Do turkeys vote for Christmas? Well, now we know that yes, sometimes they do. I’ve often despaired of the way that people so often vote out of unenlightened self-interest. But now that the people of England have voted out of unenlightened non-self-interest I find that my despair is not lessened. There was a turnout of 66.1%, …
Continue readingPosted on May 6, 2015 | 11 Comments
In my previous post, I mentioned the problematic way in which GM proponents tend to appeal generically to “the science” in support of GM crops, a point amplified by Ford Denison in his comment. Encouraging, being as Ford is a scientist…though not necessarily “the scientist”. Some of his own scientific work hinges on the complexities of the biological tradeoffs involved in trying to develop ‘improved’ crops that deliver on all the demanding traits humans ask of them. But as a social scientist, here I’m going to take a different tack and focus on some of the problems associated with making …
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