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 January 28, 2015 | 39 Comments
Tom has been pestering me for a while to say something about the synthesis of nitrogenous fertiliser using renewable energy. Originally I planned to write several lengthy posts with lots of data and references on this point in particular and on fertilisation in general, but I’m just too darned busy. So here is a briefer and less polished working through some of the issues. 1. Organic Fertility & Its Critics There’s a wider context here, which is the onslaught against the supposed inefficiency of the organic approach by proponents of so called ‘conventional’ farming on websites such as Biology Fortified, …
Continue readingPosted on January 19, 2015 | 16 Comments
So let’s turn the lights down low, set out the candles and uncork a bottle of red. For here at Small Farm Future it’s time for us to talk about romance. Well, when I say ‘romance’ what I mean is the tendency to be romantic. No, that’s not quite it. Oh hell, what I’m really trying to say, darling, is that sometimes people romanticise things. Not least, small scale or peasant farming. Which perhaps is why when I speak up for it, as I often do, I frequently find myself saying that it’s important not to romanticise rural life, or …
Continue readingPosted on January 11, 2015 | 16 Comments
…to affect a grandiloquent paraphrase. So, first a happy new year to everyone. Looking at your editor’s 2015 workload on and off the farm I fear that my blogging is going to be quite infrequent this year, but let me start with good intentions and something meaty. I’m currently in the middle of a series of posts about eco-panglossianism, but I thought I’d take a short break from it to address the question of polycultures (ie the practice of growing 3 or more different crops together). Last November, Patrick Whitefield took me to task for ignoring or belittling the evidence …
Continue readingPosted on December 20, 2014 | 7 Comments
And so we come to Small Farm Future’s final post of 2014 – the Year of the Family Farm, to which the British government’s considered contribution was abolishing CAP payments for entitlements under 5 hectares (oh well, I can’t say I’ll miss dealing with the Rural Payments Agency too much), and refusing to cap payments over €150,000. Still, at least it hasn’t been a bad year for literary output from the Small Farm Future publishing empire. We’ve just heard that our CEO Chris Smaje has had his paper on perennial grain breeding accepted for publication in the academic journal Agroecology and …
Continue readingPosted 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 …
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