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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 December 7, 2014 | 9 Comments
So, continuing with my odyssey behind enemy lines in the land of the eco-panglossians, we now come to the matter of energy. And if you’re still reading, Tom, with this post we begin our countdown towards the question of sustainably synthesized fertiliser (having made you wait so long, I fear my comments on this are going to be a terrible anti-climax when I finally get to them…) Let me begin with a comment made by the inestimable Mr Strouts on his blog a while back, to wit that ‘Fifty years is a looooong time in the world of energy’. Now, …
Continue readingPosted on December 2, 2014 | 16 Comments
Note: I’m duplicating this post here, as for some strange reason beyond my ken comments were closed on the version below OK I admit it, my title is pure clickbait. Who the hell am I to say what poor peasant farmers should or shouldn’t be allowed to grow? It’s just that the GM debate largely seems to involve well fed westerners getting angry with each other, ostensibly on behalf of poor farmers, whose own voices are rarely heard. So I decided I’d kind of make that explicit in my title. I thought it would be obvious that the title was …
Continue readingPosted on November 30, 2014 | No Comments
OK I admit it, my title is pure clickbait. Who the hell am I to say what poor peasant farmers should or shouldn’t be allowed to grow? It’s just that the GM debate largely seems to involve well fed westerners getting angry with each other, ostensibly on behalf of poor farmers, whose own voices are rarely heard. So I decided I’d kind of make that explicit in my title. I thought it would be obvious that the title was a wind up, but when I mentioned it on Steve Savage’s ‘Applied Mythology’ site, Steve came back at me with the …
Continue readingPosted on November 18, 2014 | 19 Comments
In this and the next few posts I’m going to continue my engagement, sometimes obliquely, with the school of thought I term eco-panglossianism because it provides a good foil for thinking about several things that need to be addressed in contemplating a small farm future – among others, historical progress, optimism for the future, humanistic philosophy, and the relationship between livelihood and economy. Oh – and the sustainable synthesis of nitrogen compounds, so do keep reading Tom if you’re still looking at my site. After these posts, I’m hoping to spend more time on this site articulating a positive vision …
Continue readingPosted on November 7, 2014 | 17 Comments
More breaking news in this post from the vortex of literary creativity that is the Small Farm Future office these days. Editor-in-chief Chris Smaje’s article about the Vallis Veg box scheme (yes, I do occasionally actually grow some plants) entitled ‘Kings and commoners: agroecology meets consumer culture’ has just been published in the academic journal ‘The Journal of Consumer Culture’. I can make individual copies available to my expectant publics once I’ve worked out how to use my author privileges to breach the publisher’s formidably defended paywall. I’m sure few would disagree that this major publishing event demands a blog …
Continue readingPosted on October 26, 2014 | 17 Comments
And so we come to Small Farm Future’s 100th blog post. Coincidentally, it’s also the first one to be sent from my new home on the farm, where I’m now living permanently (or at least until my next reckoning with Mendip District Council), using purely renewable energy from our off grid system. Well, when I say ‘purely renewable’ energy, there is of course the small matter of the satellite that spreads my messages of hope to a hungry world. But as I understand it, it was manoeuvred into position using nothing more than the hot air generated by all the …
Continue readingPosted on October 12, 2014 | 7 Comments
A few thoughts in this post on historian Emma Griffin’s recent book, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution1, which touches on many themes relevant to this blog. From a close study of memoirs and autobiographical texts written by ordinary people caught up in the British industrial revolution, Griffin argues that industrialisation did not deskill and impoverish working people – as in the still-popular ‘dark interpretation’ of the industrial revolution associated with such figures as E.P. Thompson2 – but on the contrary raised incomes and provided fertile conditions for them to develop forms of religious and political association …
Continue readingPosted on October 5, 2014 | 6 Comments
An interesting discussion occurred on my blog during my summer recess, which I thought I might address briefly in this post. It concerned inter alia the difficulties of earning a living through ‘alternative farming’, the pronouncements of Vandana Shiva, and the promise of sustainably synthesised fertiliser. I’m going to leave the last of these issues to a future post, and say a few words about the other two. So, Brian Macmillan drew attention to this interesting article which argued that farmers using alternative approaches such as permaculture are struggling to stay afloat economically – a deficiency that author Frank Aragona provocatively …
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