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 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 …
Continue readingPosted 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 …
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