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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on April 28, 2015 | 15 Comments
Well, thanks to those of you who commented on my recent annual vs perennial grains marathon. I invited Tim Crews of the Land Institute to respond, and he said he might, but it looks like he’s decided not to. So I guess the whole thing goes the way of many academic debates before it: ‘you’re wrong’, ‘no, you’re wrong’. And only time will tell. Though I’m quietly confident that in fact it is me who will ultimately prove to be right – a conclusion to which my research has pointed with remarkable consistency over the course of my career. Meanwhile, …
Continue readingPosted on April 12, 2015 | 4 Comments
This is the fifth and last of my posts about my article ‘The strong perennial vision’1 and the response to it by Timothy Crews and Lee DeHaan2 (C&D). One of C&D’s characterisations of my argument is that “Focus on perennial grains detracts from more important strategies for achieving agricultural sustainability” and they go on to criticise me by saying that I offer “no data on trends in funding, literature published or cited to support this concern. Nor [do I] substantiate the perception that groups working on what [I call] the strong and weak perennial visions are competing for attention or …
Continue readingPosted on April 10, 2015 | 6 Comments
This post continues with my exploration of Tim Crews and Lee DeHaan’s (C&D’s)1 counter-critique of my article ‘The strong perennial vision’2. One of C&D’s characterisations of my argument is that “Strong criticisms of annual agriculture are unfounded, both socially and ecologically” and that “the real challenge facing humanity is the social problem of how to adapt something like the European model [of agriculture] to other parts of the world”. That’s what I’m going to look at here, before wrapping things up next time with my final post on this issue. Actually, this one is the easiest of C&D’s various characterisations …
Continue readingPosted on April 7, 2015 | 14 Comments
Timothy Crews and Lee DeHaan (henceforth, C&D) of the Land Institute have written the above-titled paper1 in response to my paper ‘The strong perennial vision: a critical review’2, which I’ve discussed in my previous two blog posts. As mentioned in those posts, C&D provide this threefold characterisation of my argument: Ecological theory suggests that perennial grains may yield less than annual grains Strong criticisms of annual agriculture are unfounded, both socially and ecologically Focus on perennial grains detracts from more important strategies for achieving agricultural sustainability The first of these points is much the most important, and that’s what I’m …
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