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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on April 6, 2015 | 11 Comments
Following on from my previous post, this is a brief introduction to my paper ‘The strong perennial vision: a critical review’1 in the journal Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and the response2 it evoked from the perennial grain breeders at the Land Institute. The paper distinguishes between what I call the ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ perennial visions. The former involves combining the benefits of annual crops (fast growth, high allocation to seeds and other edible structures) with perennial crops (low input/low output, land conservation) and with other features of landscape design to optimise the goals of a productive and resilient/sustainable agriculture. …
Continue readingPosted on April 4, 2015 | 9 Comments
Continuing with my perennial and annual cropping theme, my scientific paper about perennial grain crops, ‘The strong perennial vision: a critical review’ has now been published online by the academic journal Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems1 (A&SFS), and is currently freely downloadable from here. It’s accompanied by a response from the Land Institute2, whose work is, I suppose, the main target of my criticism in the paper. The Land Institute folks are not at all persuaded by my analysis. And I’m not at all persuaded by their response. But I’ll come to that in a minute. The paper has emerged …
Continue readingPosted on April 1, 2015 | 29 Comments
In this post, I’m going to complete my look at Mark Shepard’s book Restoration Agriculture: Real World Permaculture for Farmers, which I began in my previous post. My focus here is on Shepard’s analysis of the productivity of perennial polycultures – a subject dear to the heart of many a permaculturist. In the chapter titled ‘Nutrition and Perennial Agriculture’ (pp.167-183), Shepard writes “The nutrition per acre under restoration agriculture outcompetes corn so much that it’s not even funny” (p.167). Let’s consider this in more detail. Shepard is actually making three different arguments in this short sentence, two of which I …
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