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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on March 28, 2015 | 17 Comments
The lovely quotation in my title represents the words of a perceptive 19th century Kansas farmer, which I came across in Geoff Cunfer’s fascinating book On The Great Plains. I’ll talk about Cunfer’s work in an upcoming post, but here I’m going to be looking at another book – Mark Shepard’s Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture For Farmers (Acres USA, 2013), which the quotation helps illuminate. I’m writing two posts on Shepard’s book – so I’ll come back to riotous farming in the next one. And to the person whose comment (which I can’t track down) here on Small Farm Future …
Continue readingPosted on March 15, 2015 | 30 Comments
I have a few posts coming up on annual and perennial plants, or more generally on the relationship between agriculture and plant growth forms. As a preface to this, I thought I might post up a list of plants (and animals) that we’ve deliberately introduced onto our site here at Vallis Veg. I was also prompted to compile the list as a result of a recent discussion with this site’s favourite Ohio-based soya expert on the number of species introduced onto our respective farms. I don’t want to make any particular points about the list. I think there are about 140 …
Continue readingPosted on March 9, 2015 | 3 Comments
Time was when every virile young man such as myself was enjoined to go west and start up a small farm enterprise. Damn right, for as a superb recent article on the Statistics Views website outlines, small farms are usually more productive acre for acre than large ones. I may just have to write a blog post on that soon. In any case, some time ago an invitation arrived in the Small Farm Future office for one of the team to go and talk at the Canadian Organic Growers’ conference in Toronto. I was far too busy myself, so I …
Continue readingPosted on March 3, 2015 | 8 Comments
I just got back from abroad to hear the sad news that Patrick Whitefield has died. Patrick taught the permaculture design course I took in 2000 which first switched me on to the possibilities of a different way of being to my urbane London life. I’ve joked with him that he was single-handedly responsible for the calamitous decline in my income over recent years, as I traded the life of university academic for that of a veg grower. A decline in income, perhaps, but not in wealth, because I find the life I now lead immeasurably richer in ways that …
Continue readingPosted on February 18, 2015 | 4 Comments
My last few posts have mostly been grappling with that school of environmental thought that styles itself ‘eco-pragmatism’, that others dub ‘techno-fixing’ or ‘hair of the dog environmentalism’ (William Ophuls), and which I prefer to call eco-panglossianism, particularly when it’s chained to a kind of Spencerian doctrine of social evolution through technological progress. I was going to put up a few more posts on the topic, but frankly I’ve become bored with it. I think I’ve pretty much said what I want to say about the eco-panglossians in my recent and not-so-recent posts, and now I want to move on …
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